People of Faith and Science from Antiquity to Today

Home , 1945 in science, Florensky (crater), Maria Gaetana Agnesi, William Daniel Phillips

Extraordinary

Wonder

Ian Robinson (editor) 1

Just one hundred pages of the stories they never tell you, how science has been pioneered by sincere religious believers, that the collaboration has been

fruitful, so do make the connection. Keep wondering

SECTION ONE THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE

Antiquity and Middle Ages before the tenth century Alhazen 965-1040, Egypt, Muslim, ‘the first scientist’ Avicenna 980-1037, Persia, Muslim, polymath Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179, Germany, Moses Maimonides 1135-1204 Spain, Jewish Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253, England, theologian, scientist, bishop Roger Bacon 1214-1294, England and France, natural scientist, friar William of Occam 1287-1347 England, France, Bavaria, philosopher, friar Jean Buridan 1300-1358 France, priest, physicist Nicole Oresme, 1320-1382, France, bishop, scientist, philosopher Nicolas Copernicus 1473-1543 Prussia, canon, astronomer Francis Bacon 1561-1626 England, philosopher, statesman, scientist, author. Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 Italy, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher Johannes Kepler 1571-1630 Germany, Austria, mathematician, astronomer, Lutheran Blaise Pascal 1623-1662 France, mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher. Robert Boyle, 1627-1691 Ireland, England natural philosopher, chemist, physicist Isaac Newton 1642-1727 England, physicist and mathematician Christian Elena Piscopia, 1646-1684, Italy, theology, philosophy, maths, languages, music, Laura Bassi 1711 –1778, Italy, science, anatomy, mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi 1718-1799, Italy, mathematician and philosopher André-Marie Ampère 1775- France, physicist and mathematician, Christian William Conybeare 1787 – 1857 English geologist Mary Anning 1799-1847 English palaeontologist

SECTION TWO AFTER DARWIN

Albert Einstein, 1877-1955, Germany, theoretical physicist, Jewish Michael Faraday, 1791-1867 England, scientist in electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-1879 Scotland, mathematical physicist, evangelical Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907 Ireland, Britain, mathematical physicist, engineer, Christian Henrietta Leavitt 1868-1921 astronomer, USA Teilhard de Chardin, 1881-1955 France, philosopher, priest, palaeontologist and geologist Max Born 1882–1970 German/British Jewish/Lutheran, physicist Michael Polanyi - 1891-1976 scientist, philosopher, Hungary Mary Keller 1914-1985 computer scientist USA John Polkinghorne, 1930- , UK, theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, Anglican priest. Michal Kazimierz Heller, 1936- Poland, cosmologist, philosophy of science and logic, priest. John Hedley Brooke 1944-, Professor of History of Science, UK LIST of more 20th Century scientists John Lennox, 1945- mathematician, philosopher of science UK Francis Collins, 1950-, physician-geneticist, USA. Alisdair McGrath 1953- molecular biophysics and theologian, UK Jennifer Wiseman astronomer USA Rosalind Picard 1962- computer science USA LIST of more 21st Century scientists

SECTION THREE FOUR ESSAYS

On Galileo and Darwin – John Polkinghorne Keeping Me Awake – Ian Robinson Zoning In on the Evidence from Science – Ian Robinson An Experiment in Extraordinary Wonder – Ian Robinson Short Bibliography and websites of international level science and faith organisations

Science needs Christianity and Christianity needs science.

INTRODUCTION

This collection of profiles shows that faith can be good for science. It has become popular to believe that holding a faith-conviction is bad for your practise in science, but the reality has been quite the opposite. Without doubt, people with a personal faith-conviction have been and still are among the founders and heroes of modern science. The faiths considered here are mostly Christian, but also Muslim. They first appeared on maxdoubt.wordpress.com and other articles can be found there.

So many more profiles could have been used, and additional lists are given. I must emphasise that this is not a piece of original research – the information is sourced from several publically available sources on the internet, checked with a few authors as listed. My role in sections one and two is only as editor, with some authorship in section three.

There is one larger reason for making this collection, though. In the recent writing of history the contribution of Christianity is simply omitted. Or worse, religion is accused of undermining science. This collection shows that such an approach is a wilful blindness to the nature and the history of science. Faith has founded, shaped and sustained science. Science has helped religions to avoid superstition and cultural captivity. They argue like a married couple.

There has certainly been a standoff in twentieth century philosophies of Reason. For instance Bertrand Russell: “Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines” has been shown to be over-optimistic about his brand of ‘reason and science’. But compare his contemporary Max Born, a quantum physicist:” Those who say that study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.” Both voices sound very confident, yet very opposite conclusions - how did we get to such an impasse?

As high school graduates walk onto this campus for the first time to pursue their dream in science, I detect Russell’s assumption that scientists must ordinarily be atheists. That perception has been fed

5 to them somehow. It is a one-sided dogma about science and faith. Such hubris is not good for science or anything else.

Christianity has so shaped western culture and science in particular that its contribution has become invisible. Before Darwin famously said that the world was old and that things happened slowly, several Christians in astronomy, paleontology and geology had already been saying that. All that is now forgotten, Christian achievements are routinely taken for granted as though they are an inevitable or universal norm or the fruit of reason. The truth is more interesting than that. A great many of the core values of humanity and science and other disciplines are the legacy of Christian philosophies and beliefs.

This is not a philosophy text, teasing all the separate questions - what is knowledge? What counts as evidence? Does God exist? arguments from design and from being? Can miracles occur? What is consciousness? Are healings helped by prayer? And so on. Nor does it define the relationship between science and faith in philosophical terms. MY focus is the lived history, what actually works. As the title of the collection suggests, it is a witness to many lives lived in extraordinary wonder in both faith and science.

May I just begin by unmasking two assumptions: firstly, science is not one voice, and nor is religion. Arguments go on within religion, and within science and between those two plural systems of thinking. It has never been a simple question of ‘faith versus science’. Yet at their best both spheres subscribe to the pursuit of truth, the inspiration from wonder and the driver of curiosity, the knowability of things, the assumption of causality, the observer as a valid point of view, the importance of ethical integrity and the application of their benefit to others’ lives. Compatibility plus.

A second assumption can be put like this. In history, people did not think like we do today. ’Reason’ does not carry the same meanings. That does not make us better than them. In time, we will be shown to be just as wrong about some things, of which we are currently convinced, as they were about some things in their time. Science, theology, knowledge – they are all the same exciting enterprise. It is a trite error to say ‘science pursues evidence but faith is simply blind’.

If any of these profiles interest you, Google or Wikipedia them and explore from there. Let me know what you find out on ian.robinson @uwa.edu.au or comment on maxdoubt.wordpress.com This is a work in progress so it needs to hear from you. Let me know especially if you feel their profile failed to represent the scientists’ true position, but please give me your evidence.

My thanks to the many scientists with whom I regularly meet to talk, pray and serve, to the Religion and Globalisation Initiative at UWA and the amazing students of the Youth Science Forum.

Rev Dr Ian Robinson BA MA PhD

University of Western Australia , February 2015

SECTION ONE

THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Astronomy, Maths and medicine were strong in the medieval Islamic world, with significant interchange happening between east and west, Muslim and Christian. The ‘Dark Ages’ were not all that dark. The following list shows that the precursors of scientific thinking were widespread.

John Scotus Eriugena, a ninth-century Irish monk and philosopher taught for many years in France, and was commemorated on the Irish five pound note. He wrote, “Christ wears ‘two shoes’ in the world: Scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.”

Nemesius (?-c. 390) A bishop of Emesa whose De Natura Hominis blended theology with Galenic medicine and is notable for its ideas concerning the brain. It also may have anticipated the discovery of the circulatory system.

John Philoponus (c. 490 – c. 570): His criticism of Aristotelian physics was important to medieval science. He also theorized about the nature of light and the stars. As a theologian he rejected the Council of Chalcedon and his major Christological work is

Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – c. 636): Catholic Archbishop who preserved many scientific selections from the ancient worlds. His most popular work was Etymologiae which contained information on medicine, mathematics, astronomy, atomic theory, geography, agriculture, zoology, mineralogy, physiology, and other topics. His work was widely used throughout the medieval ages for its extent of research topics.

Rabanus Maurus (c. 780 – 856): Benedictine monk and teacher, he later became archbishop of Mainz. He wrote a treatise on Computus and the encyclopedic work De universo. His teaching earned him the accolade of Praeceptor Germaniae, or "the teacher of Germany."

Leo the Mathematician (c. 790 – after 869): Archbishop of Thessalonica, he later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic. Leo also composed his own medical encyclopaedia. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century".

Hunayn ibn Ishaq (c. 809 – 873): Assyrian Christian physician known for translations of Greek scientific works and as author of "Ten Treatises on Ophthalmology." He also wrote "How to Grasp Religion", which involved the apologetics for his faith.

Qusta ibn Luqa (820–912): Melkite physician, scientist and translator. He wrote commentaries on Euclid and a treatise on the Armillary sphere. A Latin translation of his work ‘On the Difference between the Spirit and the Soul’ ('De Differentia Spiritus et Animae') was one of the few works not attributed to Aristotle that was included in a list of ‘books to be 'read,' or lectured on, by the Masters of the Faculty of Arts, at Paris in 1254, as part of their study of Natural Philosophy. He was known for medical works admired by Muslims as well, such as Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca: The Risālā Fī Tadbīr Safar Al-ḥa

Alhazen 965-1040, Egypt

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan was an Arab scientist, polymath, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. He was the first person to test hypotheses with verifiable experiments, developing the scientific method more than 200 years before European scholars learned of it by reading his books.

In particular he made significant contributions to the principles of optics, as well as to astronomy and mathematics. He also wrote insightful commentaries on works by Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the Greek mathematicians. He was nicknamed Ptolemaeus Secundus ("Ptolemy the Second") or simply "The Physicist" in medieval Europe.

A devout Muslim, Alhazen believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned that one had to eliminate human opinion and allow the universe to speak for itself through physical experiments.

"The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration."

According to one version of his biography, overconfident about practical application of his mathematical knowledge, he assumed that he could regulate the floods of the Nile. After being ordered by the ruler of the Fatimid caliphate to carry out this operation, he quickly perceived the impossibility of what he was attempting to do. Fearing for his life, he feigned madness and was placed under house arrest, during which he undertook scientific work.

After the death of the ruler he was able to prove that he was not mad, and for the rest of his life he made money copying texts while writing mathematical works and teaching. He has been said to be the father of modern optics, experimental physics and scientific methodology" and could be regarded as the first theoretical physicist.

The Latin translation of his main work, Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics), exerted a great influence on Western science: for example, on the work of Roger Bacon, who cites him by name.

Bradley Steffens wrote: Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist, the world’s the first biography of the Muslim polymath. ISBN1599350246 (ISBN13: 9781599350240)

Avicenna 980-1037, Persia

Avicenna commonly known as Ibn Sīnā, or Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 works on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving works concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities.

The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. It provided a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).

His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age

Ibn Sīnā was a devout Muslim and sought to reconcile rational philosophy with Islamic theology. His aim was to prove the existence of God and His creation of the world scientifically and through reason and logic. Avicenna wrote a number of treatises dealing with Islamic theology. These included treatises on the Islamic prophets, whom he viewed as "inspired philosophers", and on various scientific and philosophical interpretations of the Qur'an, such as how Quranic cosmology corresponds to his own philosophical system.

Ibn Sīnā memorized the Qur'an by the age of ten, and as an adult, he wrote five treatises on suras from the Qur'an. One of these texts included the Proof of Prophecies, in which he comments on several Quranic verses and holds the Qur'an in high esteem. Avicenna argued that the Islamic prophets should be considered higher than philosophers.

 The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.  The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

Hildegard 1098-1179 Germany

Hildegard is also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath.

She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play.

She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, with miniature illuminations. Hildegard corresponded with popes, German emperors and other notable figures such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,

From an early age she experienced heavenly visions. Hildegard says that she first saw "The Shade of the Living Light" at the age of three, and by the age of five she began to understand that she was experiencing visions and recognized that it was a gift that she could not explain to others.

"When I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch."

In her first theological text, Scivias ("Know the Ways"), Hildegard describes her struggle within:

Hildegard's works include three great volumes of visionary theology; a variety of musical compositions for use in liturgy, as well as the musical morality play Ordo Virtutum; one of the largest bodies of letters (nearly 400) to survive from the Middle Ages, addressed to correspondents ranging from Popes to Emperors to abbots and abbesses, and including records of many of the sermons she preached in the 1160s and 1170's; two volumes of material on natural medicine and cures; an invented language called the Lingua ignota ("unknown language");and various minor works, including a gospel commentary and two works of hagiography.

Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval Church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard, particularly her music. This is one of the largest repertoires among medieval composers. Viriditas or ‘greenness’ is an earthly expression of the heavenly as the power of life is an image that appears frequently in Hildegard’s works. Hildegard also wrote Physica, a text on the natural sciences, as well as Causae et Curae. Hildegard of Bingen was well known for her healing powers involving practical application of tinctures, herbs, and precious stones. In both texts Hildegard describes the natural world around her, including the cosmos, animals, plants, stones, and minerals.

She combined these elements with a theological notion ultimately derived from Genesis: all things put on earth are for the use of humans. She is particularly interested in the healing properties of plants, animals, and stones, though she also questions God's effect on man's health. One example of her healing powers was curing the blind with the use of Rhine water.

Hildegard was one of the first persons for whom the Roman canonization process was officially applied. She is officially a Doctor of the Church. , "perennially relevant" and "an authentic teacher of theology and a profound scholar of natural science and music." In space, the minor planet 898 Hildegard is named for her.

Below are some quotes that illustrate her ecological thinking, health science and spirituality:

 With nature's help, humankind can set into creation all that is necessary and life sustaining.

 The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.

 Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly…The earth is at the same time mother, she is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.

 The truly holy person welcomes all that is earthly.

 Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things. . . . All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. For without it we cannot survive.

 The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. The earth should not be injured! The earth must not be destroyed!

 Humankind, full of all creative possibilities, is God’s work. Humankind alone is called to assist God. Humankind is called to co-create. With nature’s help, humankind can set into creation all that is necessary and life-sustaining.

 God has arranged all things in the world in consideration of everything else.

 All of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.

 Whenever the blood vessels come into contact with body fluids which have been shocked in such a manner, then they also reach the vessels of the ears and now and then affect the hearing capability, because often a person earns health or sickness with hearing; similarly, the person is overjoyed with happiness, but with misfortune falls into deep sorrow.

 Overeating, or a diet saturated with fat or raw foods, can damage the heart muscle. In addition to heart pain, such excesses can cause fatigue, mood changes, possible loss of weight, and sometimes loss of consciousness.

Moses Maimonides 1135-1204 Spain

Maimonides, also known as Mosheh ben Maimon or RaMBaM (Hebrew acronym for Rabbeinu Mosheh Ben Maimon) was a preeminent medieval physician, philosopher, astronomer and Torah scholar. He was born in Córdoba (where the monument pictured left is situated, part of present-day Spain) during Islamic Moorish Rule, in 1135 and died in Egypt on December 12, 1204. In accordance with his wishes, his remains were taken to Tiberias, where he was re-interred on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel.

Although his writings on Jewish law and ethics were met with acclaim and gratitude from most Jews, there were also vociferous critics of some of his writings. Nevertheless, he was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history, his copious work still forms a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. The volume, clarity and range of his written work are remarkable, given his tiring life as a physician and rabbi.

He read Greek philosophers and was deeply immersed in the sciences and learning of Islamic culture. When the Almohads, conquered Córdoba in 1148, they abolished the protected status (dhimma) of the Jewish and Christian communities. For the next ten years, Maimonides moved about in southern Spain, eventually settling in Fes in Morocco. During this time, he composed his acclaimed commentary on the Mishnah in the years 1166–1168. It is exceptional for its logical construction, concise and clear expression and extraordinary learning, so that it became a standard against which other later codifications were often measured. It is still closely studied in Rabbinic yeshivot (academies). A popular medieval saying that also served as his epitaph states, “From Mosheh (of the Torah) to Mosheh (Maimonides) there was none like Mosheh”.

Maimonides shortly thereafter was instrumental in ransoming Jews taken captive during the Crusader King Amalric's siege of the Egyptian town of Bilbays. Later, with the loss of the family funds due to a tragedy at sea, Maimonides assumed the vocation of physician, for which he was to become famous. Gaining widespread recognition, he was appointed a physician to the royal family.

In his medical writings, he described many conditions, including asthma, diabetes, hepatitis, and pneumonia, and emphasized moderation and a healthy lifestyle. His observations became influential for generations of physicians. He was knowledgeable about Greek and Arabic medicine, and followed the principles of humorism in the tradition of Galen. He did not blindly accept authority but used his own observation and experience.

Maimonides was also one of the most influential figures in medieval Jewish philosophy. His brilliant adaptation of Aristotelian thought to Biblical faith deeply impressed later Jewish thinkers. Some Jews in the century that followed his death sought to apply Maimonides's Aristotelianism in ways that undercut traditionalist belief and observance, giving rise to a bitter intellectual controversy in Spanish and southern French Jewish circles. The most rigorous medieval critique came from Hasdai

Crescas'. Crescas bucked the eclectic trend, by demolishing the certainty of the Aristotelian world- view, not only in religious matters but also in the most basic areas of medieval science (such as physics and geometry). Crescas’ works on Jewish law, if indeed ever committed to writing – have not reached us. But his concise philosophical work Or Adonai, The Light of the Lord became a classical Jewish refutation of medieval Aristotelianism, and a harbinger of the scientific revolution in the 16th century. Crescas' critique in turn provoked a number of 15th-century scholars to write defences of Maimonides. This conflict was not just between two Jewish scholars. Copernicus (see his profile in this collection) was soon to get into the same trouble for the same radical change of thought.

Because of his path-finding synthesis of Aristotle and Biblical faith, Maimonides had a fundamental influence on the great Christian theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, plus other Scholastic philosophers, included Albert the Great, and Duns Scotus.

The principle that inspired his philosophical activity was identical to a fundamental tenet of Scholasticism: there can be no contradiction between the truths which God has revealed and the findings of the human mind in science and philosophy. Maimonides primarily relied upon the science of Aristotle and the teachings of the Talmud, commonly finding basis in the former for the latter. This illustrates the hold that Aristotelianism had over the medieval mind. Yet, in some important points, he departed from the teaching of Aristotle; for instance, he rejected the Aristotelian doctrine that God's provident care extends only to humanity, and not to the individual.

 Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it, - without having regard to any religion or opinion.  Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress.  You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.  You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.  The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.

Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253 England

Robert was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, Franciscan theologian, scientist and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents at Stradbroke in Suffolk. A.C. Crombie calls him "the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways, of the modern English intellectual tradition".

Grosseteste wrote in Latin and French on the creation of the world and Christian redemption, as well as texts on household management and courtly etiquette. He also wrote theological works including the influential Hexaëmeron in the 1230s. He was also a highly regarded author of manuals on pastoral care in churches and monasteries. However, Grosseteste is best known as an original thinker for his work concerning what would today be called science or the scientific method.

From about 1220 to 1235 he wrote a host of scientific treatises including:

 De sphera. An introductory text on astronomy.  De luce. On the "metaphysics of light." (which is the most original work of cosmogony in the Latin West)  De accessu et recessu maris. On tides and tidal movements. (although some scholars dispute his authorship)  De lineis, angulis et figuris. Mathematical reasoning in the natural sciences.  De iride. On the rainbow.

He also wrote a number of commentaries on Aristotle, including the first in the West of Posterior Analytics, and one on Aristotle's Physics, which has survived as a loose collection of notes or glosses on the text.

Grossesteste is now believed to have had a very modern understanding of colour, and supposed errors in his account have been found to be based on corrupt late copies of his essay on the nature of colour, written in about 1225. The 'Ordered Universe' collaboration of scientists and historians at Durham University studying medieval science regard him as a key figure in showing that pre- Renaissance science was far more advanced than previously thought.

Roger Bacon 1214-1294 England

Roger was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He taught at Oxford and Paris in the founding phase of these two great centres of learning, where he won the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, meaning "wonderful teacher". He is sometimes credited, mainly starting in the 19th century, as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by Aristotle , Robert Grosseteste, and later Arabic scholars, such as those of Muslim scientist Alhazen.

He was a forerunner in Calendar Reformation, based on his calculation of the actual length of the earth’s rotation around the sun.

He urged all theologians to study all sciences closely, and to add them to the normal university curriculum. With regard to the obtaining of knowledge, he strongly championed experimental study over reliance on authority, arguing that "thence cometh quiet to the mind". Bacon did not restrict this approach to theological studies. He rejected the blind following of prior authorities, both in theological and scientific study, which was the accepted method of undertaking study in his day.

The study of optics in part five of Opus Majus draws heavily on the works of both Claudius Ptolemy (from Arabic translation) and the Islamic scientists Alkindus (al-Kindi) and Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham). He includes a discussion of the physiology of eyesight, the anatomy of the eye and the brain, and considers light, distance, position, and size, direct vision, reflected vision, and refraction, mirrors and lenses. His research in optics was primarily oriented by the legacy of Alhazen through a Latin translation of the latter's monumental Kitab al-manazir (De aspectibus; Perspectivae; The Optics), while the impact of the tradition of al-Kindi (Alkindus) was principally mediated through the influence that this Muslim scholar had on the optics of Robert Grosseteste. Moreover, Bacon's investigations of the properties of the magnifying glass partly rested on the handed-down legacy of Islamic opticians, mainly Alhazen, who was in his turn influenced by Ibn Sahl's 10th-century legacy in dioptrics.

 Argument is conclusive... but... it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment. For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns. His hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.

 For the things of this world cannot be made known without knowledge of mathematics.

William Of Occam 1287-1347 England

William was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. He is commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, and also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.

One important contribution that he made to modern science and modern intellectual culture was ‘efficient reasoning’ with the principle of parsimony in explanation and theory building that came to be known as Occam's Razor. This maxim, as interpreted by Bertrand Russell, states that if one can explain a phenomenon without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it, i.e. that one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible causes, factors, or variables. He formulates it as: "For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture." For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity is God; everything else is contingent. His scepticism to which his ontological parsimony request leads appears in his doctrine that human reason can prove neither the immortality of the soul nor the existence, unity, and infinity of God. These truths, he teaches, are known to us by revelation alone.

Ockham wrote a great deal on natural philosophy, including a long commentary on Aristotle's Physics. In the theory of knowledge, Ockham distinguished between intuitive and abstract cognition; intuitive cognition depends on the existence or non-existence of the object, whereas abstractive cognition "abstracts" the object from the existence predicate.

Ockham is also increasingly being recognized as an important contributor to the development of Western constitutional ideas, especially those of government with limited responsibility. He was one of the first medieval authors to advocate a form of church/state separation, and was important for the early development of the notion of property rights. His political ideas are regarded as "natural" or "secular", holding for a secular absolutism. The views on monarchical accountability espoused in his Dialogus (written between 1332 and 1347) greatly influenced the Conciliar movement and assisted in the emergence of liberal democratic ideologies

 It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.

Nicole Oresme 1320-1382 France

Also known as Nicolas d'Oresme, he was a significant philosopher of the later Middle Ages. He wrote influential works on economics, mathematics, physics, astrology and astronomy, philosophy, and theology; was Bishop of Lisieux, a translator, a counsellor of King Charles V of France, and probably one of the most original thinkers of the 14th century

In his Livre du ciel et du monde Oresme discussed a range of evidence for and against the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis. In his mathematical work, Oresme developed the notion of incommensurate fractions, fractions that could not be expressed as powers of one another, and made probabilistic, statistical arguments as to their relative frequency.

Oresme's most important contributions to mathematics are contained in Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum. In a quality, or accidental form, such as heat, he distinguished the intensio (the degree of heat at each point) and the extensio (as the length of the heated rod). For the sake of clarity, Oresme conceived the idea of visualizing these concepts by plane figures, approaching what we would now call rectangular co-ordinates.. Oresme proposed that the geometrical form of such a figure could be regarded as corresponding to a characteristic of the quality itself.

He extended this doctrine to figures of three dimensions. He considered this analysis applicable to many different qualities such as hotness, whiteness, and sweetness. Significantly for later developments in calculus, Oresme applied this concept to the analysis of local motion where the latitudo or intensity represented the speed, the longitudo represented the time, and the area of the figure represented the distance travelled. thus Oresme manages to anticipate Galileo´s discovery.

Significantly, Oresme developed the first proof of the divergence of the harmonic series, something that was only replicated in later centuries by the Bernoulli brothers. He was the first mathematician to prove this fact, and (after his proof was lost) it was not re-proved until the 17th century. He also worked on fractional powers and the notion of probability over infinite sequences, ideas which would not be further developed for the next three and five centuries, respectively.

In his Treatise on the origin, nature, law, and alterations of money, one of the earliest manuscripts devoted to an economic matter, Oresme brings an interesting insight on the medieval conception of money.

Jean Buridan 1300-1358 France

Jean was a French priest who sowed the seeds of the Copernican revolution in Europe. After receiving his Master of Arts degree around 1320, Buridan became a lecturer in natural, metaphysical, and moral philosophy at the University of Paris. He quickly achieved recognition as a gifted philosopher, but he remained a secular cleric rather than becoming a member of a religious order, and he never sought a degree in theology. Little is known of his personal life.

He was a pioneer in introducing theology into physical questions; for example, he argued that God could create a vacuum even though Aristotle posited the vacuum’s impossibility.

The conception of science formulated by Buridan justified its pursuit within the framework of the Christian doctrine of divine omnipotence. His concept has been followed since the late seventeenth century. To make science compatible with Christian dogma, Buridan had to break its traditional ties with metaphysics and define its principles methodologically, in terms of their value in “saving the phenomena.” He still encountered some theological difficulties in applying this method within the domain of physics, as did Galileo three centuries later; but after the time of Buridan, natural philosophy had its own legitimacy and ceased to be either only a handmaiden of theology or a mere exposition of the doctrines of Aristotle.

He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia, and an important development in the history of medieval science. His name is most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's ass (a thought experiment which does not appear in his extant writings).

The concept of inertia was alien to the physics of Aristotle. Aristotle, and his peripatetic followers, held that a body was only maintained in motion by the action of a continuous external force. Thus, in the Aristotelian view, a projectile moving through the air would owe its continuing motion to eddies or vibrations in the surrounding medium, a phenomenon known as antiperistasis. In the absence of a proximate force, the body would come to rest almost immediately.

Jean Buridan, following in the footsteps of John Philoponus and Avicenna, proposed that motion was maintained by some property of the body, imparted when it was set in motion. Buridan named the motion-maintaining property impetu.

In 1340 Buridan was rector of the University of Paris for a second time, and in that year he signed a statute of the faculty of arts which censured certain masters for the practice of construing texts in a literal sense rather than in accordance with the intentions of the authors, warning that this practice gave rise to “intolerable errors not only in philosophy but with respect to Sacred Scripture”.

It is not unlikely that he fell victim to the Black Plague, which in 1358 took the lives of many of those who had managed to survive its first outbreak in 1349

Nicolau Copernicus 1473-1543 Prussia

Nicolau was a mathematician and astronomer who formulated a heliocentric model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre

Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. Copernicus had a doctorate in canon law , that is, the law of the church, though not himself a priest) and, though without degrees, was a physician, polyglot, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he set down a quantity theory of money, a principal concept in economics to the present day.

The publication of Copernicus' book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, is considered a major event in the history of science. It began the Copernican Revolution and contributed importantly to the scientific revolution.

He withheld publication of his theories for fear, not of the church authorities as is commonly stated, but from other astronomers who were wed to Aristotle and Ptolemy, according to Alvin Schmidt (p226). Indeed, Copernicus wrote:

Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun. Copernicus - De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)

Arthur Koestler called Copernicus ‘the timid canon’. Though a Catholic, it was his Lutheran friends, Rheticus and Osiander, who persuaded him to publish and gave great help to do so, and that the Lutheran prince (Duke Albrecht of Prussia) subsidized the publication. It is said he held the published work in his hands only on his death bed.

 To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge. As quoted in Poland: The Knight among Nations (1907) by Louis E. Van Norman, p. 290.  To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.  How exceedingly vast is the godlike work of the Best and Greatest Artist!  The Universe has been wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator.

Francis Bacon 1561-1626 England

Francis was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularized inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: "Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences". Historian and biographer William Hepworth Dixon considered that Bacon's name could be included in the list of Founders of the United States of America.

"Howbeit we know after a time there will now be a general reformation, both of divine and humane things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others: for it's fitting, that before the rising of the Sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky" – Fama Fraternitatis http://www.sacred-texts.com/sro/rhr/rhr06.htm

"Like good and faithful guardians, we may yield up their fortune to mankind upon the emancipation and majority of their understanding, from which must necessarily follow an improvement of their estate [...]. For man, by the fall, fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. – Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

"We ought therefore here to observe well, and make it known unto everyone, that God hath certainly and most assuredly concluded to send and grant to the whole world before her end ... such a truth, light, life, and glory, as the first man Adam had, which he lost in Paradise, after which his successors were put and driven, with him, to misery. Wherefore there shall cease all servitude, falsehood, lies, and darkness, which by little and little, with the great world's revolution, was crept into all arts, works, and governments of men, and have darkened most part of them". – Confessio Fraternitatis

Johannes Kepler 1571-1630 Germany

Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his laws of planetary motion, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. He said: I have constantly prayed to God that I might succeed in what Copernicus had said was true.

Despite his desire to become a minister, near the end of his studies Kepler was recommended for a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz (later the University of Graz). He accepted the position in April 1594, at the age of 23. However he was expelled from this position in 1598 because of his Lutheran convictions. Another time he was fined for burying his second child according to Lutheran funeral rites.

Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe who said that he studied ‘the divine works that shine forth everywhere in the structure of the world’. Kepler succeeded Brahe as the imperial mathematician. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. In 1596 he bravely wrote the first public defence of the Copernican system, even though Brahe, Luther, and the Vatican opposed it. This was dangerous. In 1615 the Vatican would declare it a heresy to oppose Aristotle’s theory of geo-centrism (See entry Galileo).

Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason. Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's Metaphysics", and as "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens", transforming the ancient tradition of physical cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics.

Moments before he died an attending Lutheran pastor asked him where he placed his faith. Calmly he replied, ‘Solely and alone in the work of our Redeemer Jesus Christ.’ Those were the final words of the man who earlier in his life had written that he only tried “thinking God’s thoughts after him.”  His wisdom is infinite; that of which we are ignorant is contained in Him, as well as the little that we know.  The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.  Praise and glorify with me the wisdom and greatness of the Creator, which I have revealed in a deeper explication of the form of the universe, in an investigation of the causes, and in my detection of the deceptiveness of sight.  The Creator chose nothing without a plan.  [May} God who is the most admirable in his works… deign to grant us the grace to bring to light and illuminate the profundity of his wisdom in the visible (and accordingly intelligible) creation of this world.

Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 Italy

Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics”, the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science”. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.

Galileo's championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the absence of an observed stellar parallax. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could be supported as only a possibility, not an established fact.

Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Holy Office, then found "vehemently suspect of heresy", was forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works, Two New Sciences, in which he summarised the work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.

The Roman Church has recently officially retracted its condemnation of Galileo, saying: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.” Pope John Paul II

 It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.  Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.  The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.  I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.  The holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word.

Robert Boyle 1627-1691 England

Robert was a 17th-century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Born in Lismore County Waterford, Ireland, he was also noted for his writings in theology. Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry.

In addition to philosophy, Boyle devoted much time to theology, showing a very decided leaning to the practical side and an indifference to controversial polemics. At the Restoration of the king in 1660 he was favourably received at court, and in 1665 would have received the provost ship of Eton College, if he would have taken orders; but this he refused to do on the ground that his writings on religious subjects would have greater weight coming from a layman than a paid minister of the Church.

As a director of the East India Company he spent large sums in promoting the spread of Christianity in the East, contributing liberally to missionary societies and to the expenses of translating the Bible or portions of it into various languages. Boyle supported the policy that the Bible should be available in the vernacular language of the people (in contrast to the Latin-only policy of the Roman Catholic Church at the time). An Irish language version of the New Testament was published in 1602 but was rare in Boyle's adult life. In 1680—1685 Boyle personally financed the printing of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, in Irish. In this respect, Boyle's attitude to the Irish language differed from the English Ascendancy class in Ireland at the time, which was generally hostile to the language and largely opposed the use of Irish (not only as a language of religious worship).

He was a pioneer studying races, and he believed that all human beings, (no matter how diverse their physical differences), came from the same source: Adam and Eve.

In his Will, Boyle provided money for a series of lectures to defend the Christian religion against those he considered "notorious infidels, namely atheists, deists, pagans, Jews and Muslims", with the provision that controversies between Christians were not to be mentioned

 The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation.

Isaac Newton 1642-1727 England

Isaac was an English physicist and mathematician who is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, laid the foundations for most of classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics and shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the invention of the infinitesimal calculus.

Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. It also demonstrated that the motion of objects on the Earth and that of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity, Newton removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of the cosmos.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours of the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In addition to his work on the calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, and developed Newton's method for approximating the roots of a function.

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian and, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty, he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, perhaps because he privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. In addition to his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton also dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. In his later life, Newton became president of the Royal Society. He also served the British government as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint.

Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity.

In Newton's eyes, worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, to him the fundamental sin. Historian Stephen D. Snobelen says of Newton, “He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his personal beliefs." Most scholars identify Newton as an Antitrinitarian monotheist.

Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."

Along with his scientific fame, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. Newton wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. He placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which agrees with one traditionally accepted date. He also tried unsuccessfully to find hidden messages within the Bible.

He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia "I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity". He saw evidence of design in the system of the world: "Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice". But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities. For this, Leibniz lampooned him: "God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion." Newton's position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace's work "Celestial Mechanics" had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits don't require periodic divine intervention.

Newton and Robert Boyle's approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. The clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a "Natural Religion".

The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment "magical thinking", and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the Universe. Newton gave Boyle's ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them. Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles. These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed people to pursue their own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect themselves with their own rational powers.

Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. His spokesman, Clarke, rejected Leibniz' theodicy which cleared God from the responsibility for l'origine du mal by making God removed from participation in his creation, since as Clarke pointed out, such a deity would be a king in name only, and but one step away from atheism. But the unforeseen theological consequence of the success of Newton's system over the next century was to reinforce the deist position advocated by Leibniz. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason, and humans, as Odo Marquard argued, became responsible for the correction and elimination of evil.

 I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

 If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.  Yet one thing secures us whatever betide, The scriptures assures us the Lord will provide."  This most beautiful system [The Universe] could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. This Being governs all things not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called ‘Lord God’.. Or ‘Universal Ruler’… And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent and powerful Being… he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done…Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things.  All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the idea and will of a Being necessarily existing.

Blaise Pascal 1623-1662 France

Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.

In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he invented the mechanical calculator. He built 20 of these machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.

In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following an experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His wrote: the Lettres provinciales set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids. Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics.

On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems to have carefully sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant discovered it only by chance after his death.[ This piece is now known as the Memorial. His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters.

Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as the Pensées ("Thoughts"), was not completed before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination and

28 defence of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). The first version of the numerous scraps of paper found after his death appeared in print as a book in 1669 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of scepticism and stoicism, personalized by Montaigne on one hand, and Epictetus on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God.

Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece and a landmark in French prose. When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language. Will Durant hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose." In Pensées, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity—seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. Rolling these into one he develops Pascal's Wager.

T. S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic lifestyle derived from a belief that it was natural and necessary for a person to suffer. In 1659, Pascal fell seriously ill. During his last years, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Sickness is the natural state of Christians."

 The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.  It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.  Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects to show that she is only His image.  Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Elena Piscopia, 1646-1684, Italy

Born into Venetian aristocracy, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia shone at an early age. Her birthplace Venice had been a major centre of the Renaissance and Piscopia carried on the tradition started by her male predecessors, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, of being a polymath.

Her enlightened father provided her with the best learning opportunities available at the time and advocating her cause in the male-dominated corridors of academia. From early on, she exhibited extraordinary reasoning powers. She learned Latin, Greek, music, theology, and mathematics. She eventually added Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaic, and also French, English, and Spanish. She studied philosophy, and astronomy. Musically talented, by the time she was 17 years old she could sing, compose, and play such instruments as the violin, harp, and harpsichord.

Her achievements attracted the attention of many, including clerics, royals, and scientists. Many came to Venice to meet and speak with her.

Elena herself wanted to enter the Benedictine Order. She secretly practiced the disciplines of the Order and turned down marriage proposals, spending time serving the sick and the poor. But her father refused permission for her to enter the Order, and had her apply instead to the University of Padua.

Although some other women had studied science and math at the university level in Italy in her time, Elena Piscopia was the first to apply in theology. She studied there from 1672-1678, and in 1678, she received her master's and doctorate of philosophy degrees. She spoke for an hour in classical Latin, explaining difficult passages selected at random from the works of Aristotle.

The young prodigy’s performance amazed and awed her examiners and she breezed through to gain her doctorate, in 1678, at the age of 32.The ceremony awarding her these degrees had to be held in the cathedral to accommodate the crowd that came to see her receive them. No other woman received a doctorate at Padua until the twentieth century.

Elena Piscopia became a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Padua, where she served until her early death in 1684. Passionate about learning and helping the poor, she rejected numerous suitors to focus on these pursuits. In fact, she devoted the last years of her life exclusively to study and charity.

Her achievement did not immediately open doors for many others, though. No other woman earned a doctorate at the University of Padua until the late twentieth century

Laura Bassi 1711 –1778 Italy

Italian scientist, anatomist, mathematician received a doctoral degree from the University of Bologna in May 1732, only the third academic qualification ever bestowed on a woman by a European university, and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe. She was the first woman to be offered an official teaching position at a university in Europe. Bassi was equally skilled at French and Italian classical literature.

Born in Bologna into a wealthy family, she was privately educated and tutored for seven years in her teens by Gaetano Tacconi, a University teacher of Biology, Natural History and Medicine. She came to the attention of Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, who encouraged her scientific work.

She was appointed professor of anatomy in 1732 at the University of Bologna at the age of 21, was elected to the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in 1732 and, the next year, was given the chair of philosophy. Bassi became the second woman in Europe to receive a degree from a university. In her early years, her teaching opportunities were restricted to occasional lectures

Significantly, her 1732 degree ceremony took place in the Palazzo Publico, a location significant to the governing bodies of Bologna. These events were attended by "not only the university faculty and students, but also by principle political and religious figures of the city-the Papal Legate and vice- legate, the Archbishop of Bologna, the Gonfaloniere, the Elders, senators, and magistrates. Additionally, 'all the ladies of Bologna and all the Nobility'." In other words, the Bologna community came to recognize the achievements of Bassi earning and receiving her degree.

In 1738, she married Giuseppe Veratti, a fellow academic with whom she had twelve children. After this, she was able to lecture from home on a regular basis and successfully petitioned the University for more responsibility and a higher salary to allow her to purchase her own equipment.

. As a result of her unique position, Bassi’s name became widely known in academic circles and one biographer notes that “no scholar would pass through Bologna without being eager for her learned conversation”. Her correspondents included the French philosopher Voltaire and during 1744-5 she helped him to become a member of the Bologna Academy of Science

One of her principal patrons was the former Cardinal, now Pope Benedict XIV. He supported less censorship of scholarly work, such as happened with Galileo, and he supported women figures in learning, including Maria Agnesi.

She was mainly interested in Newtonian physics and taught courses on the subject for 28 years. She was one of the key figures in introducing Newton's ideas of physics and natural philosophy to Italy. She also carried out experiments of her own in all aspects of physics. In order to teach Newtonian

31 physics and Franklinian electricity, topics that were not focused in the university curriculum, Bassi gave private lessons. In her lifetime, she authored 28 papers, the vast majority of these on physics and hydraulics, though she did not write any books. She published only four of her papers. Although only a limited amount of her scientific works were left behind, much of her scientific impact is evident through her many correspondents including Voltaire, Charles Bonnet, Giambattista Beccaria, Alessandro Volta. Voltaire once wrote to her saying "There is no Bassi in London, and I would be much happier to be added to your Academy of Bologna than that of the English, even though it has produced a Newton".

In 1745, Lambertini (now Pope Benedict XIV) established an elite group of 25 scholars known as the Benedettini ("Benedictines", named after himself.) Bassi pressed hard and was appointed to this group, the only woman in the group. She was at the forefront of a new interplay between theology and natural sciences.

During the 1760s, Bassi and her husband worked together on experimental research in electricity. This attracted talent of Abbe Nollet and others to Bologna to study electricity.

In 1776, at the age of 65, she was appointed to the chair in experimental physics by the Bologna Institute of Sciences, with her husband as a teaching assistant. Two years later, she died, having made physics into a lifelong career and broken a huge amount of ground for women in academic circles. She left behind 6,000 pages of precious documents, giving detailed accounts of her life and work.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi 1718-1799, Italy

Maria was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. She is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus and was an honorary member of the faculty at the University of Bologna. She devoted the last four decades of her life to studying theology (especially patristics) and to serving the poor.

Maria was recognized as a child prodigy very early; she could speak both Italian and French at five years of age. By her eleventh birthday she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin in addition to French and Italian, and was referred to as the "Seven-Tongued Orator". When she was nine years old, she composed and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to some of the most distinguished intellectuals of the day. The subject was women's right to be educated. By fourteen, she was studying ballistics and geometry. When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna.

Her father remarried twice after Maria's mother died, and Maria Agnesi ended up the eldest of 23 children, including her half-siblings. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Although her father refused to grant this wish, he agreed to let her live from that time on in an almost conventual semi-retirement, avoiding all interactions with society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics.

During that time, Maria studied both differential and integral calculus. Fellow philosophers thought she was extremely beautiful and her family was recognized as one of the wealthiest in Milan. Maria became a professor at the University of Bologna.

The most valuable result of her labours was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana, which was published in Milan in 1748 and "was regarded as the best introduction extant to the works of Euler." In the work, she worked on integrating mathematical analysis with algebra, with an analysis of finite quantities followed by the analysis of infinitesimals. It was in French translation 1775, English translation 1801. The work was dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa, who thanked Agnesi with the gift of a diamond ring, a personal letter, and a diamond and crystal case. Many others praised her work, including Pope Benedict XIV, who wrote her a complimentary letter and sent her a gold wreath and a gold medal.

In 1750, on the illness of her father, she was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy and physics at Bologna, though she never served. She was the second woman ever to be granted professorship at a university, Laura Bassi being the first. After the death of her father in 1752 she carried out a long-cherished purpose by giving herself to the study

33 of theology, and especially of the Fathers and devoted herself to the poor, homeless, and sick, giving away the gifts she had received and begging for money to continue her work with the poor. In 1783, she founded and became the director of the Opera Pia Trivulzi, a home for Milan's elderly, where she lived as the nuns of the institution did.

Asteroid 16765 Agnesi (1996) is named for her.

Andre -Marie Ampe re 1775-1836 France

Ampere was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him.

 ‘Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.’ James C. Maxwell

Andre-Marie Ampère was born during the height of the French Enlightenment and weathered the French Revolution. He began teaching himself advanced mathematics at age 12. In later life Ampère claimed that he knew as much about mathematics and science when he was eighteen as ever he knew; but, a polymath, his reading embraced history, travels, poetry, philosophy, and the natural sciences. His mother was a devout woman, so Ampère was also initiated into the Catholic faith along with Enlightenment science.

The French Revolution (1789–99) that began during his youth was also influential: Ampère’s father was called into public service by the new revolutionary government, becoming a justice of the peace in a small town near Lyon. When the Jacobin faction seized control of the Revolutionary government in 1792, his father Jean-Jacques Ampère resisted the new political tides, and he was guillotined on 24 November 1793, as part of the Jacobin purges of the period.

In 1796 Ampère met Julie Carron, and in 1799 they were married. André-Marie Ampère took his first regular job in 1799 as a mathematics teacher, which gave him the financial security to marry Carron and father his first child, Jean-Jacques), the next year. In the Napoleonic regime in France, Ampère was appointed a professor of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-Bresse, leaving his ailing wife and infant son in Lyon. He used his time in Bourg to research mathematics, producing Considérations sur la théorie mathématique de jeu (1802; “Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games”), a treatise on mathematical probability that he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1803!

After the death of his wife in July 1803, Ampère moved to Paris, where he began a tutoring post at the new École Polytechnique in 1804. Despite his lack of formal qualifications, Ampère was appointed a professor of mathematics at the school in 1809. As well as holding positions at this school until 1828, in 1819 and 1820 Ampère offered courses in philosophy and astronomy, respectively, at the University of Paris, and in 1824 he was elected to the prestigious chair in experimental physics at the Collège de France. In 1814 Ampère was invited to join the class of

35 mathematicians in the new Institute Impériale, the umbrella under which the reformed state Academy of Sciences would sit.

Ampère engaged in a diverse array of scientific inquiries during the years leading up to his election to the academy—writing papers and engaging in topics from mathematics and philosophy to chemistry and astronomy. Such breadth was customary among the leading scientific intellectuals of the day. Ampère claimed that "at eighteen years he found three culminating points in his life, his First Communion, the reading of Antoine Leonard Thomas's "Eulogy of Descartes", and the Taking of the Bastille.

For a time he took into his family the young student Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853), one of the founders of the Conference of Charity, later known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul.

On the day of his wife's death he wrote two verses from the Psalms, and the prayer, 'O Lord, God of Mercy, unite me in Heaven with those whom you have permitted me to love on earth.' Serious doubts harassed him at times, and made him very unhappy. Then he would take refuge in the reading of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church."

William Daniel Conybeare 1787-1857

Conybeare was dean of Llandaff, an English geologist, palaeontologist and clergyman. He is probably best known for his ground-breaking work on marine reptile fossils in the 1820s, including important papers for the Geological Society of London on ichthyosaur anatomy and the first published scientific description of a plesiosaur. (from Wikipedia)

He went in 1805 to Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1808 he took his degree of BA, in classics and mathematics. Having entered holy orders he became in 1814 curate of Wardington, near Banbury, and he accepted also a lectureship at Brislington near Bristol. During this period he was one of the founders of the Bristol Philosophical Institution (1822). He was rector of Sully in Glamorganshire from 1823 to 1836, and vicar of Axminster from 1836 to 1844. He was appointed to deliver the eminent Bampton lecture at Oxford in 1839, on An analytical examination into ... the writings of the Christian Fathers during the Ante-Nicene period - an historical topic but nothing that hints of palaeontology. He was instituted to the deanery of Llandaff in 1845.

Attracted to the study of geology by the lectures of Dr John Kidd he pursued the subject with ardour. As soon as he had left college he made extended journeys in Britain and on the continent, and he became one of the early members of the Geological Society. Both Buckland and Sedgwick acknowledged their indebtedness to him for instruction received when they first began to devote attention to geology.

He contributed geological memoirs to the Transactions of the Geological Society, the Annals of Philosophy, and the Philosophical Magazine . In 1821, in collaboration with Henry De la Beche he distinguished himself by describing, from fragmentary remains, the saurian Plesiosaurus in a paper for the Geological that also contained an important description and analysis of all that had been learned to that point about the anatomy of ichthyosaurs including the fact that there had been at least three different species. His predictions about the plesiosaur were proved correct by the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton by Mary Anning in 1823, which Conybeare described to the Geological Society in 1824. Among his most important memoirs is that on the south-western coal district of England, written in conjunction with Dr Buckland, and published in 1824.

His principal work, however, is the Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales (1822), being a second edition of the small work issued by William Phillips and written in co-operation with that author. The original contributions of Conybeare formed the principal portion of this edition, of which only Part 1, dealing with the Carboniferous and newer strata, was published. It affords evidence throughout of the extensive and accurate knowledge possessed by Conybeare; and it exercised a marked influence on the progress of geology in Britain. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a corresponding member of the Institute of France. In 1844, he was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London.

He was taken ill on the way to Weybridge, Surrey, to see his gravely ill eldest son, William John Conybeare in July 1857, who died, and his own death followed shortly thereafter on 12 August 1857, at Itchen Stoke, Hampshire, where another son, Charles Ranken Conybeare, had recently taken up the incumbency of the parish church, and a third son, Henry Conybeare, was later to build a new church to replace it. He is buried near the Chapter House at Llandaff Cathedral and his tomb is marked by a cross on a slender memorial shaft]

Mary Anning 1799-1847

Mary was a British fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for important finds she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, a county in Southwest England on the coast of the English Channel, where she lived. Her work contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth. (from Wikipedia).

Mary Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. It was dangerous work, and she nearly lost her life in 1833 during a landslide that killed her dog, Tray. Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified, which she and her brother Joseph found when she was just twelve years old; the first two plesiosaur skeletons found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. When geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, he based it largely on fossils Anning had found, and sold prints of it for her benefit.

On 19 August 1800, when Anning was 15 months old, an event occurred that became part of local lore. She was being held by a neighbour, Elizabeth Haskings, who was standing with two other women under an elm tree watching an equestrian show being put on by a travelling company of horsemen when lightning struck the tree killing all three women below. Onlookers rushed the infant home where she was revived in a bath of hot water. A local doctor declared her survival miraculous. Her family said she had been a sickly baby before the event but afterwards she seemed to blossom. For years afterward members of her community would attribute the child's curiosity, intelligence and lively personality to the incident.

Her education was extremely limited. She was able to attend a Congregationalist Sunday school where she learned to read and write. Congregationalist doctrine, unlike that of the Church of England at the time, emphasised the importance of education for the poor. Her prized possession was a bound volume of the Dissenters' Theological Magazine and Review, in which the family's pastor, the Reverend James Wheaton, had published two essays, one insisting that God had created the world in six days, the other urging dissenters to study the new science of geology. Dissent indeed.

In addition the family's status as religious dissenters — not followers of the Church of England — attracted discrimination. Dissenters were not allowed into universities or the army, and were excluded by law from several professions. Her father had been suffering from tuberculosis and

39 injuries he suffered from a fall off a cliff. When he died in November 1810 (aged 44), he left the family with significant debts and no savings, forcing them to apply for parish relief.

The family continued collecting and selling fossils together, and set up a table of curiosities near the coach stop at a local inn. Although the stories about Anning tend to focus on her successes, Dennis Dean writes that her mother and brother were astute collectors too, and her parents had sold significant fossils before the father's death

Due to Anning's gender and social class, she was prevented from fully participating in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, dominated as it was by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. She struggled financially for much of her life. Her family was poor, and as religious dissenters, were subject to legal discrimination. Her father, a cabinetmaker, died when she was eleven.

Although Anning knew more about fossils and geology than many of the wealthy fossilists to whom she sold, it was always the gentlemen geologists who published the scientific descriptions of the specimens she found, often neglecting to mention her name. She became resentful of this. Anna Pinney, a young woman who sometimes accompanied Anning while she collected, wrote: "She says the world has used her ill ... these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages." Torrens writes that these slights to Anning were part of a larger pattern of ignoring the contributions of working-class people in early-19th-century scientific literature. Often a fossil would be found by a quarryman, construction worker, or road worker who would sell it to a wealthy collector and it was the latter who was credited if the find was of scientific interest.

She became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as about collecting fossils. Nonetheless, as a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. Indeed, she wrote in a letter: "The world has used me so unkindly; I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims.

Around 1830 she switched from attending the local Congregational church, where she had been baptised and in which she and her family had always been active members, to the Anglican Church. The change was prompted in part by a decline in Congregational attendance that began in 1828 when its popular pastor, John Gleed, a fellow fossil collector, left for the United States to campaign against slavery. He was replaced by the less likeable Ebenezer Smith. The greater social respectability of the established church, in which some of Anning's gentleman geologist customers such as Buckland, Conybeare, and Sedgwick were ordained clergy, was also a factor. Anning, who was devoutly religious, actively supported her new church as she had her old.

After her death in 1847, her unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "[t]he carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it." In 2010, one hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.

SECTION TWO

SCIENCE AFTER DARWIN

After Charles Darwin’s publication of his theory , On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. On 24 November 1859, science and religion had many fierce arguments in public. It wasn’t a new theory, but its global scope obtained from Darwin’s round the world voyage on the Beagle gave it a peculiar impact in its day. The theosophical arguments for God from design and from providence were weakened in their hitherto received form, and God was, in popular understanding, relegated to a first principle - a clock-maker. It is still like that.

These arguments have moved on since then, but the popular (common sense) understanding remains uninformed by either science or faith.

The following profiles start out of historical sequence with Albert Einstein’s admiration for Newton, Maxwell and Faraday.

Albert Einstein 1879-1955 Germany

Albert Einstein, arguably the most famous scientist of recent centuries, was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity, two of the pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics, which he didn’t like). While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.

Einstein kept a picture of Isaac Newton on his study wall, alongside pictures of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Who were they? We have read in section one about the quirky and brilliant Isaac Newton. Now let’s look at Faraday and Maxwell. Surprisingly these men were all outstanding pioneers in physics and also sincere men of faith. They set up the twentieth century of science. Einstein’s Jewish background was not where his own mind took him, but he was religiously convinced of some things about God.

 Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 I want to know how God created this world… I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.  I have never found a better expression than ‘religious’ for this trust in the rational nature of reality and of its peculiar accessibility to the human mind. Where this trust is lacking science degenerates into an uninspired procedure. Let the devil care if the priests make capital out of this. There is no remedy for that.  Whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances in this domain [science] is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence... the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence.  Certain it is that a conviction, akin to a religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order…This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.

Michael Faraday 1791-1867 England

Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include those of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.

Although Faraday received little formal education he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. He similarly discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.

As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion. Faraday ultimately became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a lifetime position.

Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple language; his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry or any but the simplest algebra. James Clerk Maxwell took the work of Faraday and others, and summarized it in a set of equations that is accepted as the basis of all modern theories of electromagnetic phenomena. On Faraday's uses of the lines of force, Maxwell wrote that they show Faraday "to have been in reality a mathematician of a very high order – one from whom the mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods." The SI unit of capacitance, the farad, is named in his honour.

Faraday was a devout Christian; his Sandemanian denomination was an offshoot of the Church of Scotland. Well after his marriage, he served as deacon and for two terms as an elder in the meeting house of his youth. His church was located at Paul's Alley in the Barbican. This meeting house was relocated in 1862 to Barnsbury Grove, Islington; this North London location was where Faraday served the final two years of his second term as elder prior to his resignation from that post. Biographers have noted that "a strong sense of the unity of God and nature pervaded Faraday's life and work."

In June 1832, the University of Oxford granted Faraday a Doctor of Civil Law degree (honorary). During his lifetime, Faraday rejected a knighthood and twice refused to become President of the Royal Society. Faraday was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1838, and was one of eight foreign members elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1844.

James Maxwell 1831-1879 Scotland

Maxwell was a Scottish mathematical physicist. His most prominent achievement was to formulate a set of equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's achievements concerning electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.

With the publication of A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light. Maxwell proposed that light is in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. The unification of light and electrical phenomena led to the prediction of the existence of radio waves.

He helped develop the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution in the statistics of kinetic theory of gases. He is also known for presenting the first durable colour photograph in 1861 and for his foundational work on analysing the rigidity of rod-and-joint frameworks (trusses) like those in many bridges.

His discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. Many physicists regard Maxwell as the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics, and his contributions to the science are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. In the millennium poll—a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists—Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only Newton and Einstein. On the centenary of Maxwell's birthday, Einstein himself described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."

Maxwell was an evangelical Presbyterian, and in his later years became an Elder of the Church of Scotland. Maxwell's religious beliefs and related activities have been the focus of a number of papers. Attending both Church of Scotland (his father's denomination) and Episcopalian (his mother's denomination) services as a child, Maxwell later underwent an evangelical conversion in April 1853, which committed him to an antipositivist position. This was theological evangelicalism, famous for opposing slavery and reforming prisons, not the social conservative group now known by that name.

 All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

William Thomson, (Lord Kelvin) 1824-1907 Ireland

William was an Irish and British mathematical physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast in 1824. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He worked closely with mathematics professor Hugh Blackburn in his work. He also had a career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, which propelled him into the public eye and ensured his wealth, fame and honour. For his work on the transatlantic telegraph project he was knighted by Queen Victoria, becoming Sir William Thomson. He had extensive maritime interests and was most noted for his work on the mariner's compass, which had previously been limited in reliability.

Lord Kelvin is widely known for determining the correct value of absolute zero as approximately -273.15 Celsius. The existence of a lower limit to temperature was known prior to Lord Kelvin, as shown in "Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat", published by Sadi Carnot in French in 1824, the year of Lord Kelvin's birth. "Reflections" used -267 as an estimate of the absolute zero temperature. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour.

On his ennoblement in 1892 in honour of his achievements in thermodynamics, and of his opposition to Irish Home Rule, he adopted the title Baron Kelvin, of Largs in the County of Ayr and is therefore often described as Lord Kelvin. He was the first UK scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.

Thomson remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life; attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine. He saw his Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work, as is evident from his address to the annual meeting of the Christian Evidence Society, 23 May 1889.

One of the clearest instances of this interaction is in his estimate of the age of the Earth. Given his youthful work on the figure of the Earth and his interest in heat conduction, it is no surprise that he chose to investigate the Earth's cooling and to make historical inferences of the Earth's age from his calculations. Thomson was a creationist in a broad sense, but he was not a 'flood geologist'. He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the organisation and evolution of the solar system and other structures, followed by a gradual "heat death". He developed the view that the Earth had once been too hot to support life and contrasted this view with that of uniformitarianism, that conditions had remained constant since the indefinite past. He contended that "This earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe ...."

After the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, Thomson saw evidence of the relatively short habitable age of the Earth as tending to contradict Darwin's gradualist explanation of slow natural selection bringing about biological diversity. Thomson's own views favoured a version of theistic evolution sped up by divine guidance. His calculations showed that the sun could not have possibly existed long enough to allow the slow incremental development by evolution – unless some energy source beyond what he or any other Victorian era person knew of was found. He was soon drawn into public disagreement with geologists, and with Darwin's supporters John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. In his response to Huxley’s address to the Geological Society of London (1868) he presented his address "Of Geological Dynamics", (1869) which, among his other writings, challenged the geologists' acceptance that the earth must be of indefinite age.

 Science is bound, by the everlasting vow of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can be fairly presented to it.

 I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.

Henrietta Leavitt 1868–1921 USA

A minister's daughter and noted astronomer who was the head of Photometry (astronomy) at Harvard. A practicing Congregationalist, Leavitt was the descendant of early Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan settlers. Her parents, who were said to have been strict Puritans, did encourage Leavitt to use her intellect. The majority of people in that period did not support education for women.

After graduation she took another astronomy course, but then suffered a debilitating illness. It left her profoundly deaf

She discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars. A graduate of Radcliffe College, Leavitt started working at the Harvard College Observatory as a "computer" in 1893, examining photographic plates in order to measure and catalogue the brightness of stars.

Though she received little recognition in her lifetime, it was her discovery that first allowed astronomers to measure the distance between the Earth and faraway galaxies Edwin Hubble’s discoveries, who established that the Universe is expanding, were made possible by Leavitt's ground-breaking research. "If Henrietta Leavitt had provided the key to determine the size of the cosmos, then it was Edwin Powell Hubble who inserted it in the lock and provided the observations that allowed it to be turned," wrote David H. and Matthew D.H. Clark in their book Measuring the Cosmos.

To his credit, Hubble himself often said that Leavitt deserved the Nobel Prize for her work. Leavitt was a hard-working, serious-minded individual, little given to frivolous pursuits and selflessly devoted to her family, her church, and her career.

Leavitt was not allowed to pursue her own topics of study, but researched what the head of the observatory assigned. Because of the prejudices of the day, she didn't have the opportunity to use her intellect to the fullest, but a colleague remembered her as "possessing the best mind at the Observatory," and a modern astronomer calls her "the most brilliant woman at Harvard." She worked at the Harvard College Observatory until her death from cancer in 1921

"Miss Leavitt inherited, in a somewhat chastened form, the stern virtues of her puritan ancestors," Solon I. Bailey, a Harvard professor wrote of Leavitt in 1922, quoted on the AAVSO website. "She took life seriously. Her sense of duty, justice and loyalty was strong. For light amusements she appeared to care little. She was a devoted member of her intimate family circle, unselfishly considerate in her friendships, steadfastly loyal to her principles, and deeply conscientious and sincere in her attachment to her religion and church. She had the happy faculty of appreciating all that was worthy and lovable in others, and was possessed of a nature so full of sunshine that, to her, all of life became beautiful and full of meaning.

Teilhard de Chardin 1881-1955 France

Teilhard was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a palaeontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. Teilhard de Chardin has two comprehensive works. First, The Phenomenon of Man sets forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity to ultimately a reunion with Christ. Following the leads of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, he abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favour of allegorical and theological interpretations.

The second comprehensive work of Teilhard de Chardin is The Divine Milieu, in which attempted to do two things. First, in the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a belief among some Catholics and other Christians that in order to be “holy” one had to devote himself or herself to purely religious activity and that secular work had no lasting value. Teilhard de Chardin, consistent with the Jesuit motto of “finding God in all things”, wanted to demonstrate that secular work (including his own scientific work) was an integral element of creation and the Incarnation, so that for religious reasons, Christians should be committed to whatever work they were doing and offering it up for the service of God.

Teilhard wants to show how all human activities and efforts toward personal growth and human progress can be used to help the growth and development of the Body of Christ. Not only are human efforts useful in this regard, but they are also somehow necessary. Even though people perform these actions as ordinary human beings, and they look like ordinary human actions, they are simultaneously being transformed in the divine milieu and become actions done in, with, and through Christ.

Some of Teilhard de Chardin's ideas came into conflict with certain officials in the Roman Curia and in his own Jesuit order. Specifically, Teilhard's superiors thought that Teilhard's views on the doctrine of original sin were contrary to Catholic doctrine. As a result, many of Teilhard's writings were prohibited from being published during his lifetime. However, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said in July 2009: “By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn’t be studied.”

 You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.  Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.  Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

Max Born 1882–1970 Germany

Max was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Having been nominated several times, Born did win the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in Quantum Mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".

In 1905, he began researching special relativity with Minkowski, and subsequently wrote his habilitation thesis on the Thomson model of the atom. A chance meeting with Fritz Haber in Berlin in 1918 led to discussion of the manner in which an ionic compound is formed when a metal reacts with a halogen, which is today known as the Born–Haber cycle.

In 1921, Born returned to Göttingen, which he led to become one of the world's foremost centres for physics, working with, for instance, Werner Heisenberg, Siegfried Flügge, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Robert Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf , Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, and Eugene Wigner. "Theoretical physics," Einstein had said to him, "will flourish wherever you happen to be; there is no other Born to be found in Germany today."

In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and Born, who was Jewish, was suspended. He emigrated to Britain, where he took a job at St John's College, Cambridge, where he wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, and Atomic Physics, that soon became a standard text book. His tenure at Göttingen was terminated in May 1935 and in November 1935, the Born family had their German citizenship revoked, rendering them stateless. A few weeks later Göttingen cancelled Born's doctorate. While briefly in India, he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, in October 1936. He became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before World War II broke out in Europe. During 1939, he got as many of his remaining friends and relatives still in Germany as he could out of the country.

He remained at Edinburgh until 1952, when he retired to West Germany.

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice. This quotation is often paraphrased as 'God does not play dice'.

In 1928, Einstein nominated Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but Heisenberg alone won the 1932 Prize. On 25 November 1933, Born received a letter from Heisenberg in which he said he had been delayed in writing due to a "bad conscience" that he alone had received the Prize "for work done in Göttingen in collaboration — you, Jordan and I."

Heisenberg went on to say that Born and Jordan's contribution to quantum mechanics cannot be changed by "a wrong decision from the outside." In 1954, Heisenberg wrote an article honouring Planck for his insight in 1900, in which he credited Born and Jordan for the final mathematical formulation of matrix mechanics and Heisenberg went on to stress how great their contributions were to quantum mechanics, which were not "adequately acknowledged in the public eye."

In his Nobel lecture he reflected on the philosophical implications of his work:

I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science. On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking (Lockerung des Denkens) seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.

 Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.  Born declared in his autobiography that “theoretical physics is actual philosophy,” and speculated that, despite the predictive success of quantum mechanics, “something,” although inaccessible to the observer, may yet exist beneath the laws of probability:  If God made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

Michael Polanyi 1891-1976 Hungary

Michael was a Hungarian polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to science, economics, and philosophy. He argues that positivism supplies a false account of knowing, which if taken seriously undermines our highest achievements as human beings. This view if accepted could alone arrest most of the science-faith divergence.

His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown, Polanyi emigrated to Karlsruhe, and was invited by Fritz Haber to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie in Berlin. In 1923 Polanyi converted to Christianity, and in a Roman Catholic ceremony married Magda Elizabeth Kemeny. With the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazi party, he accepted a chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils, Eugene Wigner and Melvin Calvin went on to win a Nobel Prize. Because of his increasing interest in the social sciences, Manchester University created a new chair in Social Science (1948–58) for him. Two of his chemistry pupils and his son won Nobel Prizes. He was elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was a member of the Royal Society, Senior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Together with John Baker, he founded the influential Society for Freedom in Science. He argued that just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, science is a spontaneous order that arises as a consequence of open debate amongst specialists. Science (contrary to the claims of Bukharin) flourishes when scientists have the liberty to pursue truth as an end in itself: "[S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization. Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about." Polanyi defends a free society not on the negative grounds that we ought to respect "private liberties", but on the positive grounds that "public liberties" facilitate our pursuit of objective ideals. According to Polanyi a free society which strives to be value neutral undermines its own justification. But it is not enough for the members of a free society to believe that ideals such as truth, justice, and beauty, are objective, they also have to accept that they transcend our ability to wholly capture them. The objectivity of values has to be combined with acceptance that all knowing is fallible.

All knowing is personal In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science, noting that it ignores the role which personal commitments play in the practice of science. Polanyi ‘s Gifford Lectures in 1951-2 at Aberdeen were later published as Personal Knowledge (1958). Polanyi claims that all knowledge claims (including those which are derived from rules) rely on personal judgements. He denies that a scientific method can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments. Polanyi argued that the assumptions which underlie critical philosophy are not only false; they undermine the commitments which

52 motivate our highest achievements. He advocates a fiduciary post-critical approach, in which we recognise that we believe more than we can prove, and know more than we can say. A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it. Polanyi rejected the claim by British Empiricists that experience can be reduced into sense data, but he also rejects the notion that "indwelling" within (sometimes incompatible) interpretative frameworks traps us within them. Our tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality. It was while writing Personal Knowledge that he identified the "structure of tacit knowing". He viewed it as his most important discovery.

Critique of reductionism In "Life's irreducible structure" (1968), Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNA molecule is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Although a DNA molecule cannot exist without physical properties, these properties are constrained by higher-level ordering principles. In "Transcendence and Self-transcendence" (1970), Polanyi criticizes the mechanistic world view that modern science inherited from Galileo. Polanyi advocates emergence i.e. the claim that there are several levels of reality and of causality. . Mind is a higher-level expression of the capacity of living organisms for discrimination. The reductionistic attempt to reduce higher-level realities into lower-level realities generates what Polanyi calls a moral inversion, in which the higher is rejected with moral passion. Polanyi identifies it as a pathology of the modern mind and traces its origins to a false conception of knowledge; although it is relatively harmless in the formal sciences, that pathology generates nihilism in the humanities.

1997. Society, Economics and Philosophy: Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi. Edited with an introduction by R.T. Allen. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers. Includes an annotated bibliography of Polanyi's publications.

Mary Kenneth Keller 1914–1985 .USA

American nun who was the first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science in the US. . In June 1965 she, along with Irving Tang became the first in America to earn a PhD in Computer Science. She earned her degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She took her vows with the Sisters of Charity in 1940. Later she earned a B.S. in Mathematics and a M.S. in Mathematics and Physics from DePaul University. She also worked in the computer science centre at Dartmouth College, a men-only institution at the time, where she joined John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz to create the BASIC programming language.[4]

Keller believed in the potential for computers to increase access to information and promote education. In 1965, after earning her PhD, Keller founded the computer science department at Clarke College in Iowa, which she directed for twenty years. Clarke College named the Keller Computer Centre and Information Services after her, which provides computing and telecommunication support to Clarke College students, faculty members, and staff. The college has also established the Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science Scholarship in her honour.

Keller wrote four books about computer science. In her words, 'We're having an information explosion, among others, and it's certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it's available.' Keller's vision extended beyond education and reached toward artificial intelligence. 'For the first time, we can now mechanically simulate the cognitive process. We can make studies in artificial intelligence. Beyond that, this mechanism [the computer] can be used to assist humans in learning. As we are going to have more mature students in greater numbers as time goes on, this type of teaching will probably be increasingly important.'

John Polkinghorne 1930- UK

Polkinghorne is an English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of Mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge from 1988 until 1996.

Polkinghorne is the author of five books on physics, and 26 on the relationship between science and religion; his publications include The Quantum World (1989), Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (2005), Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (2007), and Questions of Truth (2009). He was knighted in 1997 and in 2002 received the £1 million Templeton Prize, awarded for exceptional contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension.

Polkinghorne believes his move from science to religion has given him “binocular vision”, though he understands that it has aroused for some the kind of suspicion "that might follow the claim to be a vegetarian butcher." He describes his position as critical realism , after Michael Polanyi, and believes that science and religion address aspects of the same reality. It is a consistent theme of his work that when he "turned his collar around" he did not stop seeking truth. He argues that there are five points of comparison between the ways in which science and theology pursue truth:  moments of enforced radical revision,  a period of unresolved confusion,  new synthesis and understanding,  continued wrestling with unresolved problems,  deeper implications.

Because scientific experiments try to eliminate extraneous influences, he believes they are atypical of what goes on in nature. He suggests that the mechanistic explanations of the world that have continued from Laplace to Richard Dawkins should be replaced by an understanding that most of nature is cloud-like rather than clock-like. He regards the mind, soul and body as different aspects of the same underlying reality—"dual aspect monism"—writing that "there is only one stuff in the world (not two—the material and the mental) but it can occur in two contrasting states (material and mental phases, a physicist might say) which explain our perception of the difference between mind and matter." He believes that standard physical causation cannot adequately describe the manifold ways in which things and people interact, and uses the phrase "active information" to describe how, when several outcomes are possible, there may be higher levels of causation that choose which one occurs. Sometimes Christianity seems to him to be just too good to be true, but when this sort of doubt arises he says to himself, "All right then, deny it," and writes that he knows this is something he could never do. An extract of his essay on Galileo and Darwin is in Part Three of this collection.

Michal Kazimierz Heller 1936- Poland

Heller is a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland, and an adjunct member of the Vatican Observatory staff. He also serves as a lecturer in the philosophy of science and logic at the Theological Institute in Tarnow.

A Roman Catholic priest belonging to the diocese of Tarnow, Dr Heller was ordained in 1959. Michal Heller attended high school in Mościce, graduated from the Catholic University of Lublin, where he earned a master's degree in philosophy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in cosmology in 1966.

After beginning his teaching career at Tarnow, he joined the faculty of the Pontifical Academy of Theology in 1972 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1985. The recipient of an honorary degree from the Cracow University of Technology, he has been a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a visiting scientist at Belgium’s University of Liège, the University of Oxford, the University of Leicester, Ruhr University in Germany, The Catholic University of America, and the University of Arizona among others. Dr Heller is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

His current research is concerned with the singularity problem in general relativity and the use of noncommutative geometry in seeking the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. He has published nearly 200 scientific papers not only in general relativity and relativistic cosmology, but also in philosophy and the history of science and science and theology and is the author of more than 20 books. In his volume, Is Physics an Art? (Biblos, 1998), he writes about mathematics as the language of science and also explores such humanistic issues as beauty as a criterion of truth, creativity, and transcendence.

In March 2008, Heller was awarded the $1.6 million (£820,000) Templeton Prize for his extensive philosophical and scientific probing of "big questions." His works have sought to reconcile the "known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God."

Heller plans on spending the prize money on the establishment of a research institute named after Nicholas Copernicus aimed at reconciling science and theology.

"If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about the cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God’s thinking about the universe; the question on ultimate causality: why is there something rather than nothing? When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

Science is but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made."

John Hedley Brooke 1944-, UK

Brooke was a Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College from 1967–68, then a Tutorial Fellow at the University of Sussex from 1968-69. He was on the faculty of Lancaster University from 1969 to 1999, rising from Lecturer to Professor of History of Science. He was Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow from 1995–96 and Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at The University of Oxford from 1999– 2006, where he directed the Ian Ramsey Centre and was a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

After his retirement in 2007, he became an Emeritus Fellow of Harris Manchester College and a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in the University of Durham.

He was the editor of the British Journal for the History of Science from 1989-93. He was the president of the British Society for the History of Science from 1996–98, and has been the president of Science and Religion Forum since 2006. He is also currently the president of International Society for Science and Religion. (www.issr.org.uk)

He has taught at the University of Sussex, at Lancaster University where he became Professor of the History of Science in 1992, and from 1999 to 2006, he was the first holder of the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science and Religion at Oxford, where he was also Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. He recently served as Director of the European Science Foundation's Network on ‘Science and Human Values' and is a founder member of the Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind (2005-).

His classic study Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991) is a book on the science. The book identifies three traditional views of the relationship between science and religion found in historical analyses: conflict, complementarity, and commonality. The book portrays all three as oversimplifications. It offers up the alternative notion of complexity, which bases the relationship between science and religion on changing circumstances where it is defined upon each particular historical situation and the actual beliefs and ideas of the scientific and religious figures involved.

His most recent publications include Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science & Religion, co-edited with Ian Maclean (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Religious Values and the Rise of Science in Europe, co-edited with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (IRCICA Istanbul, 2005).

Having published several essays on Darwin and religion, notably in the Cambridge Companion to Darwin and in Darwinism and Divinity, ed. John Durant (Blackwell, 1985), one of his current projects is a new essay for the Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species. During his tenure at the IAS, Professor Brooke will additionally be completing for publication an essay entitled "Darwin and God: Then and Now" based on a lecture recently delivered at Harvard. He will also be writing a chapter on 'Science and Christianity in the Modern Period' for a book entitled Science & Religion around the World that he is co-editing with Professor Ronald Numbers.

Other Believing Scientists

TWENTIETH CENTURY

The profiles above barely scratch the surface of modern scientists of faith. This link supplies hundreds more of which a few are listed below. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science

They also cite lists of Catholic scientists, Christian Nobel laureates, Quaker, Jesuit, Jewish and Muslim scientists. Here we list only the most recent names, in case the reader was tempted to believe that science normally and increasingly has been able to disprove faith.

During the previous century, the practice of science became professionalized and institutionalized in ways that continued through the 20th century. As the role of scientific knowledge grew in society, it became incorporated with many aspects of the functioning of nation-states.

George Stokes (1819–1903): A minister's son, he wrote a book on Natural Theology. He was also one of the Presidents of the Royal Society and made contributions to Fluid dynamics.

George Salmon (1819–1904): He won the Copley Medal for his mathematical works. In theology his book An Historical Introduction to the Study of the Books of the New Testament was widely read and he wrote rebuttals to John Henry Newman tracts.

Henry Baker Tristram (1822–1906): A founding member of the British Ornithologists' Union. His publications included The Natural History of the Bible (1867) and The Fauna and Flora of Palestine (1884).

Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907): Astronomer and Congregational Church pastor who lectured extensively on the relationship between science and religion. He also wrote Ecce Coelum: or Parish Astronomy in 1867. He once stated that "an undevout astronomer is mad" and held a strong belief in extra-terrestrial life.

Pierre Duhem (1861–1916): He worked on Thermodynamic potentials and wrote histories advocating that the Roman Catholic Church helped advance science.

Georg Cantor (1845–1918): Lutheran who wrote on religious topics and had an interest in medieval theology. Revolutionized the mathematical notion of infinity by the introduction of set theory.

Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919): English physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He also discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering, explaining why the sky is blue, and predicted the existence of the surface waves now known as Rayleigh waves.

James Britten (1846–1924): Botanist who was heavily involved in the Catholic Truth Society.

Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927): Walcott was a palaeontologist, most notable for his discovery of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. The late Stephen Jay Gould said that Walcott, "discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes."

Johannes Reinke (1849–1931), German phycologist and naturalist who founded the German Botanical Society. An opposer of Darwinism and the secularization of science, he wrote Kritik der Abstammungslehre (Critique of the theory of evolution), (1920), andNaturwissenschaft, Weltanschauung, Religion, (Science, philosophy, religion), (1923). He was a devout Lutheran.

William H. Bragg (1862-1942) --British physicist, chemist, and mathematician. Nobel Prize in 1915

"From religion comes a man's purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped."

Dmitri Egorov (1869–1931): Russian mathematician who made significant contributions to the broader areas of differential geometry. He was an Imiaslavie who defended religion during the Soviet era. In 1930 the Soviets arrested and imprisoned him as a "religious sectarian." He died of a hunger strike in protest.

William Williams Keen (1837–1932), first brain surgeon in the United States, and a prominent surgical pathologist who served as President of the American Medical Association. He also wrote I believe in God and in evolution.

Ronald Ross (1857–1932): Ross was a British doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. He was a believer in God and most likely an Anglican.

Mihajlo Pupin (1858–1935): Serbian-American physicist, chemist, and inventor. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1924. His The New Reformation: From Physical to Spiritual Realities concerns religion and spirituality. He also wrote the forward to Science & Religion: A Symposium.

Hugo Obermaier, 1877-1946, German palaeontologist and Catholic priest, one of the foremost experts of his time in Prehistoric art.

Pavel Florensky (1882–1937): Russian Orthodox priest who wrote a book on Dielectrics and wrote of imaginary numbers having a relationship to the Kingdom of God.]

Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937): Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known for his pioneering work on long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Marconi was baptized as Catholic[185] and personally introduced in 1931 the first radio broadcast of a Pope, Pius XI, announcing at the microphone: "With the help of God, who places so many mysterious forces of nature at man's disposal, I have been able to prepare this

59 instrument which will give to the faithful of the entire world the joy of listening to the voice of the Holy Father".

J. J. Thomson (1856–1940): J.J. Thompson, or Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, was a British physicist who discovered electrons and isotopes. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906 and was President of the Royal Society from 1915 to 1920. Thompson is described as "a regular communicant in the Anglican Church. In addition, he showed an active interest in the Trinity Mission at Camberwell. With respect to his private devotional life, J. J. would invariably practice kneeling for daily prayer, and read his Bible before retiring each night."

Eberhard Dennert (1861–1942), German naturalist and botanist who founded the Kepler Union, a group of German intellectuals who strongly opposed Haeckel's Monist League and Darwin's theory. A Lutheran, he wrote Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, which had an authorized English translation under the name At The Deathbed of Darwinism (1904).

William Henry Bragg (1862–1942): Sir Bragg was a British physicist, chemist, and mathematician who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son William Lawrence Bragg the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X- rays". Bragg was Anglican and had a license to preach at his local church.

George Washington Carver (1864–1943): George Washington Carver was an American scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor. Carver believed he could have faith both in God and science and integrated them into his life. He testified on many occasions that his faith in Jesus was the only mechanism by which he could effectively pursue and perform the art of science.

Arthur Eddington (1882–1944): Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. He was also a philosopher of science and a popularizer of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour. He is famous for his work regarding the theory of relativity. Eddington was a lifelong Quaker, and gave the Gifford Lectures in 1927.

Alexis Carrel (1873–1944): French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques.

Charles Glover Barkla (1877–1944): British physicist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1917 for his work in X-ray spectroscopy and related areas in the study of X-rays (Roentgen rays).

John Ambrose Fleming (1849–1945): In science he is noted for the Right-hand rule and work on vacuum tubes. He also won the Hughes Medal. In religious activities he was President of the Victoria Institute, and preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Philipp Lenard (1862–1947): German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties. He was also an active proponent of the Nazi ideology.

Edward Arthur Milne (1896–1950): British astrophysicist and mathematicians who proposed the Milne model and had a Moon crater named for him. In addition he won several awards including

60 the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. His last book was Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God.

Robert Millikan (1868–1953): The second son of Reverend Silas Franklin Millikan, he wrote about the reconciliation of science and religion in books like Evolution in Science and Religion. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Charles Stine (1882–1954): The son of a minister who was VP of DuPont. In religion he wrote A Chemist and His Bible and as a chemist he won the Perkin Medal.

E. T. Whittaker (1873–1956): Converted to Catholicism in 1930 and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. His 1946 Donnellan Lecture was entitled on Space and Spirit. Theories of the Universe and the Arguments for the Existence of God. He also received the Copley Medal and had written on Mathematical physics before conversion.

Johannes Stark (1874–1957): German physicist who was closely involved with the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazi regime. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 for his "discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields" (the latter is known as the Stark effect)

Milutin Milanković (1879–1958): Serbian geophysicist noted for Milankovitch cycles and the Revised Julian calendar some Orthodox churches use.

Max von Laue (1879–1960): German experimental physicist. A practising Christian, he asked that his epitaph read that he died trusting firmly in God's mercy. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.

Arthur Compton (1892–1962): He won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He also was a deacon in the Baptist Church and wrote an article in Christianity Takes a Stand that supported the controversial idea of the United States maintaining the peace through a nuclear-armed air force.

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962): English statistician, evolutionary biologist and geneticist. He preached sermons and published articles in church magazines.

Victor Francis Hess (1883–1964): Austrian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936 for the discovery of cosmic rays. He wrote on the topic of science and religion in his article "My Faith".

Georges Lemaître (1894–1966): Roman Catholic priest who was first to propose the Big Bang theory.

Lise Meitner (1878–1968): Austrian, later Swedish, physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. She was born into a Jewish family and converted to Lutheranism as an adult.

John Boyd Orr (1880–1971): Sir John Boyd Orr from 1935 to 1949, was a Scottish doctor and biologist who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his scientific research into nutrition and his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. He was the co- founder and the first President (1960–1971) of the World Academy of Art and Science. In Orr's early

61 education, the school he attended gave him a good knowledge of the Bible, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.[219] For example, Orr concluded his 1949 acceptance speech Nobel Prize with the discussion of war and religion: "Let the churches which believe in the eternal and unchangeable truth proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth redouble their efforts for peace so that we in our day may see the beginning of the building of the new and better world which our children shall inherit."

David Lack (1910–1973): Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology and convert who wrote Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief in 1957. He is in part known for his study of the genus Euplectes.

Clyde Cowan (1919–1974): American physicist, the co-discoverer of the neutrino along with Frederick Reines. The discovery was made in 1956 in the neutrino experiment. Frederick Reines received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 in both their names.

Charles Coulson (1910–1974): Methodist who wrote Science and Christian Belief in 1955. In 1970 he won the Davy Medal.

George R. Price (1922–1975): An American population geneticist who while a strong atheist converted to Christianity. He went on to write commentaries on the New Testament and dedicated portions of his life to helping the poor.

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975): Russian Orthodox geneticist who criticized young Earth creationism in an essay, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution," and argued that science and faith did not conflict.[

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976): German theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He was a practising Lutheran.

Werner von Braun (1912–1977): Braun was "one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s." He was a Lutheran who as a youth and young man had little interest in religion. But as an adult he developed a firm belief in the Lord and in an afterlife. He was pleased to have opportunities to speak to peers (and anybody else who would listen) about his faith and Biblical beliefs.

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978): An Austrian mathematician, logician, and philosopher, Gödel is known for what are called Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Gödel's completeness theorem, among other things. Gödel was baptized Lutheran, and remained a believer in God his whole life. He believed firmly in an afterlife, stating: "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]." He also developed Gödel's ontological proof for the existence of God, which was published after his death.

Pascal Jordan (1902–1980): German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix mechanics, and developed canonical anticommutation relations for fermions.

Henry Eyring (1901–1981): American chemist known for developing the Eyring equation. Also a Latter Day Saint (Mormon) whose interactions with LDS President Joseph Fielding Smith on science and faith are a part of LDS history.

Sewall Wright (1889–1988): American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a practising Unitarian.

William G. Pollard (1911–1989): Anglican priest who wrote Physicist and Christian. In addition he worked on the Manhattan Project and for years served as the executive director of Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.

Frederick Rossini (1899–1990): An American noted for his work in chemical thermodynamics. In science he received the Priestley Medal and the National Medal of Science. An example of the second medal is pictured. As a Catholic he received the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame. He was dean of the College of Science at Notre Dame from 1960 to 1971, a position he may have taken partly due to his faith.

Aldert van der Ziel (1910–1991): He researched Flicker noise and has the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers named an award for him. He also was a conservative Lutheran who wrote The Natural Sciences and the Christian Message.

Jérôme Lejeune (1926–1994): French paediatrician and geneticist known for research into chromosome abnormalities, particularly Down syndrome. He was the first President of the Pontifical Academy for Life and has been named a "Servant of God."

Werner Von Braun (1912-1977) --German-American rocket scientist

"I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."

Alonzo Church (1903–1995): American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church.

Ernest Walton (1903–1995): Irish physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 for his work with John Cockcroft with "atom-smashing" experiments done at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, and so became the first person in history to artificially split the atom, thus ushering the nuclear age. He spoke on science and faith topics.

Nevill Francis Mott (1905–1996): Mott, an Anglican, was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1977) known for explaining the effect of light on a photographic emulsion. "Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God. At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions."

Mary Celine Fasenmyer (1906–1996): Member of the Sisters of Mercy known for Sister Celine's polynomials. Her work was also important to WZ Theory.

John Eccles (1903–1997): A Nobel laureate and neurophysiologist who was a devout theist and a practicing Catholic.

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) --English mathematician and astronomer.

"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Derek Barton (1918–1998): Barton was a British organic chemist who in 1969 shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "contributions to the development of the concept of conformation and its application in chemistry." Barton, a Christian, most likely was an Anglican.

Arthur Leonard Schawlow (1921–1999): Arthur Shawlow was an American physicist who is best remembered for his work on lasers, for which he shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics. Shawlow was a "fairy Orthodox Protestant."[ In an interview, he commented regarding God: "I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life."

Carlos Chagas Filho (1910–2000): Neuroscientist who headed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for 16 years. He studied the Shroud of Turin and his "the Origin of the Universe", "the Origin of Life", and "the Origin of Man" involved an understanding between Catholicism and Science. He was from Rio de Janeiro.

Erwin Schroedinger (1887-1961) --Austrian physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1933 “I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, god and eternity."

John Lennox 1945- Ireland UK

is a British mathematician, philosopher of science and Christian apologist who is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford University. He is also Pastoral Advisor of Green Templeton College and Fellow of Wycliffe Hall. He is a leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion.

John Lennox was born in Northern Ireland, but later attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where in 1962 he also attended the last lectures of C. S. Lewis on the poet John Donne. Lennox obtained an M.A. and PhD. degree at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded a D.Sc. degree in mathematics by the University of Cardiff for his research. Lennox furthermore holds a D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford and an M.A. degree in bioethics at the University of Surrey.

Lennox has been part of numerous public debates defending the Christian faith, including debates with Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Peter Singer. The debate in 2007 against atheist Richard Dawkins, on the topic of Dawkins' book The God Delusion, was broadcast to millions worldwide, and was described by the Wall Street Journal as "a revelation: in Alabama, a civil debate over God's existence".

Francis Collins 1950-, USA

Francis Collins is an American physician-geneticist noted for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Before being appointed Director of NIH, Collins led the HGP and other pioneering genomics research initiatives as Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of NIH's 27 institutes and centres. Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as an innovative gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Collins also has written a number of books on science, medicine, and spirituality, including the New York Times bestseller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

After leaving the helm of NHGRI and before becoming Director of NIH, he founded and served as president of the BioLogos Foundation, which promotes discourse on the relationship between science and religion and advocates the perspective that belief in Christianity can be reconciled with acceptance of evolution and science. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Collins has described his parents as "only nominally Christian" and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He familiarized himself with the evidence for and against God in cosmology, and used Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis as a foundation to re-examine his religious view. He eventually came to a conclusion, and became an Evangelical Christian during a hike on a fall afternoon. He has described himself as a "serious Christian".

In his 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins considers scientific discoveries an "opportunity to worship". In his book Collins rejects Young Earth creationism and intelligent design. His own belief is theistic evolution or evolutionary creation which he prefers to term BioLogos. He appeared in December 2006 on The Colbert Report television show and in a March 2007 Fresh Air radio interview to discuss this book. While not outspoken on the subject, Collins seems to hold a pro-life view of the abortion issue. In a 1998 interview with Scientific American, he stated that he is "intensely uncomfortable with abortion as a solution to anything" and does not "perceive a precise moment at which life begins other than the moment of conception".

In an interview with National Geographic in February 2007, John Horgan, an agnostic journalist, criticized Collins' description of agnosticism as "a cop-out". In response, Collins clarified his position on agnosticism so as not to include "earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still

66 don't find an answer. I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence. I went through a phase when I was a casual agnostic, and I am perhaps too quick to assume that others have no more depth than I did".

Collins rejects intelligent design, and for this reason was not asked to participate in the 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Walt Ruloff, a producer for the film, claimed that by rejecting intelligent design, Collins was "toeing the party line", which Collins called "just ludicrous". In 2007, Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation to "contribute to the public voice that represents the harmony of science and faith". He served as the foundation's president until he was confirmed as director of the NIH.

 I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith.  God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.  Science's domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you're not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it.  One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.

Alister McGrath 1953- UK

Alister McGrath is a British Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian, scientist, and Christian apologist. On 1 April 2014 he began his new role as the Andreas Idreos Professor in Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University., formerly Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at King's College London and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture. He was previously Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxford, and principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He has also taught at Cambridge University and at Regent College. McGrath holds two doctorates from the University of Oxford, a DPhil in Molecular Biophysics and a Doctor of Divinity in Theology. He is an Anglican priest.

McGrath is noted for his work in historical theology, systematic theology, and the relationship between science and religion, as well as his writings on apologetics. He is also known for his opposition to New Atheism and antireligionism and his advocacy of critical realism. Among his best-known books are The Twilight of Atheism, The Dawkins Delusion, Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, and A Scientific Theology. He is also the author of a number of popular textbooks on theology.

Jennifer Wiseman USA

Dr Jennifer Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, where she serves as the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. She previously headed the Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics. She studies star forming regions of our galaxy using radio, optical, and infrared telescopes, with a particular interest in molecular cloud cores, protostars, and outflows.

Director of the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) program. Dr Wiseman studied physics for her bachelor’s degree at MIT, discovering comet Wiseman-Skiff in 1987. After earning her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1995, she continued her research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Johns Hopkins University.

Dr Wiseman also has an interest in national science policy and has served as an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow on Capitol Hill. She is also a public speaker and author, and enjoys giving talks on the excitement of science and astronomy to schools, youth and church groups, and civic organizations. She is a Councillor of the American Astronomical Society and a former President of the American Scientific Affiliation.

On the divide between seminary training and scientific knowledge she said: “AAAS is committed to the idea that scientific advancements must benefit society, and we believe that integrating modern scientific advancements into seminary education will benefit professors, students, and ultimately those in the pews who often appreciate and struggle with the discoveries and implications of science. While clergy need not become professional scientists, a study on the Book of Genesis, for example, could be enhanced by conversations on our incredible evolving universe, the findings and accuracy of radiometric dating and genome mapping, and responsible earth stewardship in light of climate change realities. As scientists continue to investigate the complexities of the human brain and genetic programming, religious communities must grapple with what this information says about our origins, consciousness, behaviour, and free will. Mood-altering drugs and surgeries for personality disorders are becoming more pervasive, compelling people to explore who they are and who they are meant to be. And complex ethical choices regarding personal medical care or even national policy call on the wise counsel of trusted and well- informed religious leaders. By integrating science into the core training of these leaders, AAAS and its partnering schools are enabling seminaries and religious congregations to build atmospheres that promote informed dialogue and a positive understanding of science.” Reference: http://www.aaas.org/page/equipping-tomorrow%E2%80%99s-clergy-engage-science

As a Christian, I conclude that humankind is significant, not only because of the sustainability of life on Earth, but also because, through Jesus Christ, God has revealed his willingness to have a relationship with us. http://www.rejesus.co.uk/site/module/faith_v_science/P4/

Rosalind Picard 1962- USA Rosalind Picard is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, director and also the founder of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, and chief scientist and co-founder of Affectiva.

Picard says that she was raised an atheist, but converted to Christianity as a young adult. She does not believe there is a separation of the "material body and immaterial spirit" but that there is "something else that we haven't discovered yet", and believes "that scientists cannot assume that nothing exists beyond what they can measure." She believes it likely that there is "still something more" to life, beyond what we have discovered, and sees DNA as too complex to have originated through "purely random processes". To her, the complexity of DNA shows "the mark of intervention," and "a much greater mind, a much greater scientist, a much greater engineer behind who we are."

She sees her religious beliefs as playing a role in her work in affective computing, and explains that when "Digging into the models of how the emotions work, I find I feel even greater awe and appreciation for the way we are made, and therefore for the Maker that has brought this about."

Picard is one of the signatories of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism, a petition which the intelligent design movement uses to promote intelligent design by attempting to cast doubt on evolution.

Although her view about the complexity of DNA "sounds similar to the intelligent design debate", reporter Mirko Petricevic writes, "Picard has some reservations about intelligent design, saying it isn't being sufficiently challenged by Christians and other people of faith." She argues that the media has created a false dilemma by dividing everyone into two groups, supporters of intelligent design or evolution. "To simply put most of us in one camp or the other does the whole state of knowledge a huge disservice," she said.

See her TED talk and her story of Test of Faith Rosalind lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and three energetic sons. She is co-founder of the MIT Graduate Christian Fellowship and is an active speaker at science and faith events, including Veritas forums. She interacts regularly with industry and has consulted for companies such as Apple, AT&T, BT, HP, i.Robot, and Motorola.

Other Believing Scientists

21st Century

Interest in the relationship between science and religion has increased in recent decades due to continued controversies and to recognition from awards like the Templeton Prize. Here are some identified faith-persons among the current scientific communities.

Sir Robert Boyd (1922–2004): A pioneer in British space science who was Vice President of the Royal Astronomical Society. He lectured on faith being a founder of the "Research Scientists' Christian Fellowship" and an important member of its predecessor Christians.

Alberto Dou Mas de Xaxàs, 1915-2009, Spanish/Catalan Jesuit priest and one of the foremost mathematicians of his country. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a Professor of Mathematics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and he was Rector of Universidad de Deusto from 1974 to 1977.

Richard Smalley (1943–2005): A Nobel laureate in Chemistry known for buckyballs. In his last years he renewed an interest in Christianity and supported Old Earth Creationism

Mariano Artigas (1938–2006): He had doctorates in both physics and philosophy. He belonged to the European Association for the Study of Science and Theology and also received a grant from the Templeton Foundation for his work in the area of science and religion.

J. Laurence Kulp (1921–2006): Plymouth Brethren member who led major studies on the effects of nuclear fallout and acid rain. He was a prominent advocate in American Scientific Affiliation circles in favour of an Old Earth and against flood geology.

Walter Kohn (1923- ) --American theoretical physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1998

"I am very much a scientist, and so I naturally have thought about religion also through the eyes of a scientist. When I do that, I see religion not denominationally, but in a more, let us say, deistic sense. I have been influence in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force. I feel very much the same. There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery."

Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006): Anglican priest and biochemist, his ideas may have influenced Anglican and Lutheran views of evolution. Winner of the 2001 Templeton Prize

John Billings (1918–2007): Australian physician who developed the Billings ovulation method of Natural family planning. In 1969, Billings was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (KCSG) by Pope Paul VI.

Russell L. Mixter (1906–2007): Noted for leading the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) away from anti-evolutionism, and for his advocacy of progressive creationism.

C. F. von Weizsäcker (1912–2007): German nuclear physicist who is the co-discoverer of the Bethe- Weizsäcker formula. His The Relevance of Science: Creation and Cosmogony concerned Christian and moral impacts of science. He headed the Max Planck Society from 1970 to 1980. After that he retired to be a Christian pacifist.

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008): American theoretical physicist who was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known for popularizing the term black hole, and for coining the term wormhole. He was a lifelong Unitarian.

Stanley Jaki (1924–2009) Benedictine priest and Distinguished Professor of Physics at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, who won a Templeton Prize and advocated the idea modern science, could only have arisen in a Christian society.

Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010): Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction. He was also the president of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics from 1983 to 1992, and from 1993 until his death he was the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Allan Sandage (1926–2010): An astronomer who did not really study Christianity until after age forty. He wrote the article A Scientist Reflects on Religious Belief and made discoveries concerning the Cigar Galaxy.

Ernan McMullin (1924–2011): Ordained in 1949 as a catholic priest, McMullin was a philosopher of science who taught at the University of Notre Dame. McMullin wrote on the relationship between cosmology and theology, the role of values in understanding science, and the impact of science on Western religious thought, in books such as Newton on Matter and Activity (1978) and The Inference that Makes Science (1992). He was also an expert on the life of Galileo.[273] McMullin also opposed intelligent design and defended theistic evolution.

Joseph Murray (1919–2012): A Catholic surgeon who pioneered transplant surgery. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990.

Ian Barbour (1923–2013): Physicist who wrote Christianity and the Scientists in 1960, and When Science Meets Religion ISBN 0-06-060381-X in 2000.

Stephen Meyers (1958–): Physicist and earth science. Meyers wrote Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. Worked as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science in 1991. Director of the Centre for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute and Vice President and Senior Fellow at the DI.

Eben Alexander (born 1953): American, Harvard-educated neurosurgeon best known for his book, "Proof of Heaven", in which he describes his 2008 near death experience. In a recent interview, Dr Alexander said: "It's time for brain science, mind science, physics, cosmology, to move from kindergarten up into first grade and realize we will never truly understand consciousness with that simplistic materialist mindset."

Werner Arber (born 1929): Werner Arber is a Swiss microbiologist and geneticist. Along with American researchers Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans, Werner Arber shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction endonucleases. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Arber as President of the Pontifical Academy—the first Protestant to hold that position.

Francisco Ayala, born in 1934, Spanish geneticist and naturalized US citizen, former Dominican priest and a distinguished professor at University of California Irvine. He is the recipient of the 2010 Templeton Prize and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the winner of the National medal of science. Dr Ayala has worked extensively on the relationship between the Christian faith and evolutionary theory.

Robert T. Bakker (born 1945): Palaeontologist who was a figure in the "dinosaur Renaissance" and known for the theory some dinosaurs were Warm-blooded. He is also a Pentecostal preacher who advocates theistic evolution and has written on religion.

R. J. Berry (born 1934): He is a former president of both the Linnaean Society of London and the Christians in Science group. He also wrote God and the Biologist: Personal Exploration of Science and Faith (Apollos 1996) ISBN 0-85111-446-6 H taught at University for over 20 years.

Derek Burke (born 1930): British academic and molecular biologist. Formerly a vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Professor Burke has been a specialist advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology since 1985.

Ben Carson (born 1951): American neurosurgeon. He is credited with being the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins joined at the head. Carson has stated, "I don’t believe in evolution .... I simply don’t have enough faith to believe that something as complex as our ability to rationalize, think, and plan, and have a moral sense of what’s right and wrong, just appeared.”

Alasdair Coles Alasdair Coles is a lecturer in neuroimmunology at Cambridge University and an honorary consultant neurologist to Addenbrooke’s and Hinchingbrooke Hospitals. He is involved in research into new treatments for multiple sclerosis. His amateur research interest, in the neurological basis for religious experience, came from managing a small cohort of patients with spiritual experiences due to temporal lobe epilepsy and he has given lectures on this subject at several universities. Coles was ordained in the Church of England in 2008 and is now a curate at St Andrews Church, Cambridge, alongside his medical and scientific work.

Darrel R. Falk (born 1946): Darrel Falk is an American biologist and the former president of the BioLogos Foundation.

Charles Foster (born 1962): Charles Foster is a science writer on natural history, evolutionary biology, and theology. A Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Linnaean Society of London,[289] Foster has advocated theistic in his book, The Selfless Gene (2009).

John Gurdon (born 1933): Sir John Bertrand Gurdon is a British developmental biologist. In 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells. In an interview with EWTN.com on the subject of

73 working with the Vatican in dialogue, he says "I'm not a Roman Catholic. I'm a Christian, of the Church of England...I've never seen the Vatican before, so that's a new experience, and I'm grateful for it."

Brian Heap (born 1935): Biologist who was Master of St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge and was a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion.

William B. Hurlbut (born 194?): William Hurlbut is a physician and Consulting Professor at the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, Stanford University Medical Centre. In addition to teaching at Stanford, Hurlbut served for eight years on the President's Council on Bioethics and is nationally known for his advocacy of Altered Nuclear Transfer (ANT).

Brian Kobilka (born 1955): He is an American Nobel Prize winner of Chemistry in 2012, and is professor in the departments of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kobilka attends the Catholic Community at Stanford, California.

Denis Lamoureux (born 1954): Denis Lamoureux is an evolutionary creationist and holds a professorial chair of science and religion at St. Joseph's College at the University of Alberta, Canada—the first of its kind in Canada, and with Phillip E. Johnson, Lamoureux co- authored Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins (1999). Lamoureux has also written Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (2008).

Noella Marcellino (born 1951): American Benedictine nun with a degree in microbiology. Her field of interests include fungi and the effects of decay and putrefaction.

Kenneth R. Miller (born 1948): Biology professor at Brown University who wrote Finding Darwin's God ISBN 0-06-093049-7.

Simon C. Morris (born 1951): British palaeontologist who made his reputation through study of the Burgess Shale fossils. He was the co-winner of a Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal and also won a Lyell Medal. He is active in the Faraday Institute for study of science and religion and is also noted on discussions concerning the idea of theistic evolution.

William Newsome (born 1952): Bill Newsome is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Newsome is the co-chair of the BRAIN Initiative, "a rapid planning effort for a ten-year assault on how the brain works." Newsome is also a Christian and has written about his faith: "When I discuss religion with my fellow scientists...I realize I am an oddity — a serious Christian and a respected scientist."

Martin Nowak (born 1965): Evolutionary biologist and mathematician best known for evolutionary dynamics. He teaches at Harvard University, which is pictured in an old drawing.

Ghillean Prance (born 1937): Noted botanist involved in the Eden Project. He is also the current President of Christians in Science.

Joan Roughgarden (born 1946): An evolutionary biologist who has taught at Stanford University since 1972. She wrote the book Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist.

Mary Higby Schweitzer (born 19??): palaeontologist at North Carolina State University who believes strongly in the synergy of the Christian faith and the truth of empirical science.

Gerhard Ertl (born 1936): He is a 2007 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. He has said in an interview that "I believe in God. (...) I am a Christian and I try to live as a Christian (...) I read the Bible very often and I try to understand it."

Henry F. Schaefer, III (born 1944): He wrote Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence? ISBN 0- 9742975-0-X and is a signatory of A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. He was awarded the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 1979.

Peter Bussey: British particle physicist and Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Glasgow. Educated at Cambridge University (MA, PhD, ScD), Doctor Bussey is involved in the search for the Higgs boson, and works at major international particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, DESY in Hamburg. He has given many lectures about issues concerning Christian faith and cosmology.

Charles Hard Townes (born 1915): In 1964 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1966 he wrote The Convergence of Science and Religion.

Antony Hewish (born 1924): Antony Hewish is a British Radio Astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with Martin Ryle) for his work on the development of radio aperture synthesis and its role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969. Hewish is a Christian. Hewish also wrote in his introduction to John Polkinghorne's 2009 Questions of Truth, "The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is non-intuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God and Christian belief ... may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense understanding."

Walter Thirring (born 1927): Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named. He is the son of the physicist Hans Thirring, co-discoverer of the Lense- Thirring frame dragging effect in general relativity. He also wrote Cosmic Impressions: Traces of God in the Laws of Nature.

Antonino Zichichi (born 1929): Italian nuclear physicist and former President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. He has worked with the Vatican on relations between the Church and Science.

George Coyne, born in 1933, Jesuit astronomer and former director of the Vatican Observatory.

Guy Consolmagno, born in 1952, American Jesuit astronomer who works at the Vatican Observatory.

Owen Gingerich (born 1930): Mennonite astronomer who went to Goshen College and Harvard. Mr. Gingerich has written about people of faith in science history.

Russell Stannard (born 1931): British particle physicist who has written several books on the relationship between religion and science, such as Science and the Renewal of Belief, Grounds for Reasonable Belief and Doing Away With God?.

Robert Griffiths (born 1937): A noted American physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written on matters of science and religion.

George Francis Rayner Ellis (born 1939): Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co- authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. He is an active Quaker and in 2004 he won the Templeton Prize.

Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. (born 1941): American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

Colin Humphreys (born 1941): He is a British physicist. He is the former Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science and a current Director of Research at Cambridge University, Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Institution in London and a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Humphreys also "studies the Bible when not pursuing his day-job as a materials scientist."

Christopher Isham (born 1944): Theoretical physicist who developed HPO formalism. He teaches at Imperial College London. In addition to being a physicist, he is a philosopher and theologian.[

Frank J. Tipler (born 1947): Frank Tipler is a mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University. Tipler has authored books and papers on the Omega Point, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead. His theological and scientific theorizing are not without controversy, but he has some supporters; for instance, Christian theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has defended his theology, and physicist David Deutschhas incorporated Tipler's idea of an Omega Point.[

J. Richard Gott (born 1947): Gott is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. He is known for developing and advocating two cosmological theories with the flavour of science fiction: Time travel and the Doomsday argument. When asked of his religious views in relation to his science, Gott responded that "I’m a Presbyterian. I believe in God; I always thought that was the humble position to take. I like what Einstein said: “God is subtle but not malicious.” I think if you want to know how the universe started, that’s a legitimate question for physics. But if you want to know why it’s here, then you may have to know—to borrow Stephen Hawking’s phrase—the mind of God."

William Daniel Phillips (born 1948): 1997 Nobel laureate in Physics (1997) who is a founding member of The International Society for Science and Religion.

John D. Barrow (born 1952): English cosmologist who did notable writing on the implications of the Anthropic principle. He is a United Reformed Church member and Christian deist. He won the Templeton Prize in 2006. He once held the position of Gresham Professor of Astronomy.

Stephen Barr (born 1953): Physicist who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and contributed papers to Physical Review as well as Physics Today. He also is a Catholic who writes for First Things and wrote Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. He teaches at the University of Delaware.

Karl W. Giberson (born 1957): Canadian physicist and evangelical, who has published several books on the relationship between science and religion, such as The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions and Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.

Andrew Pinsent (born 1966): Fr. Andrew Pinsent, a Catholic priest, is the Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University. He is also a particle physicist, whose previous work contributed to the DELPHI experiment atCERN.

Juan Maldacena (born 1968): Argentine theoretical physicist and string theorist, best known for the most reliable realization of the holographic principle - the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Pamela Gay (born 1973): An American astronomer, educator and writer, best known for her work in astronomical podcasting. Doctor Gay received her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, in 2002.

Ard Louis: A reader in Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. Prior to his post at Oxford he taught Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge University where he was also director of studies in Natural Sciences at Hughes Hall. He has written for The BioLogos Forum.

Don Page (born ?): Canadian theoretical physicist and practicing Evangelical Christian, Dr Page is known for having published several journal articles with Stephen Hawking.

Gerald B. Cleaver (born ?): Professor in the Department of Physics at Baylor University and head of the Early Universe Cosmology and Strings (EUCOS) division of Baylor's Centre for Astrophysics, Space Physics & Engineering Research (CASPER). His research specialty is string phenomenology and string model building.

Manuel García Doncel, (born 1930), Spanish Jesuit physicist, formerly Professor of Physics at Universidad de Barcelona.

Ian H. Hutchinson (born?): Professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research interest is plasma physics and its practical applications. He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an international experimental facility whose magnetically confined plasmas are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. He has spoken with the American Scientific Affiliation on the intersections of Christianity and science, and with The Veritas Forum as well.

Richard H. Bube (born 1927): He is an emeritus professor of the material sciences at Stanford University. He is a member of the American Scientific Affiliation.

Donald Knuth (born 1938): (Lutheran) The Art of Computer Programming and 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (1991), ISBN 0-89579-252-4.]

Freeman Dyson (born 1923): He has won the Lorentz Medal, the Max Planck Medal, and the Lewis Thomas Prize. He also ranked 25th in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. He has won the Templeton Prize and delivered one of the Gifford Lectures. He is famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics.

Walter Thirring (1927-2014), eminent Austrian quantum physicist, authored Cosmic Impressions, Templeton Press, Philadelphia and London, in 2007, and in that book he sums up his feelings about the scientific discoveries made by modern cosmology:

In the last decades, new worlds have been unveiled that our great teachers wouldn’t have even dreamed of. The panorama of cosmic evolution now enables deep insights into the blueprint of creation…. Human beings recognize the blueprints, and understand the language of the Creator…. These realizations do not make science the enemy of religion, but glorify the book of Genesis in the Bible.

John T. Houghton (born 1931): He is the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and won a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society. He's also former Vice President of Christians in Science.

John Suppe (born 1943): He is a Professor of Geology at National Taiwan University, Geosciences Emeritus at Princeton University. He has written articles like "Thoughts on the Epistemology of Christianity in Light of Science."

Eric Priest (born 1943): An authority on Solar Magneto hydrodynamics who won the George Ellery Hale Prize among others. He has spoken on Christianity and Science at the University of St Andrews and is a member of the Faraday Institute. He is also interested in prayer, meditation, and Christian psychology.

Robert J. Wicks (born 1946): Robert Wicks is a clinical psychologist who has written on the intersections of spirituality and psychology. Wicks for more than 30 years has been teaching at universities and professional schools of psychology, medicine, nursing, theology, and social work, currently at Loyola University Maryland. In 1996, he was a recipient of The Holy Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, the highest medal that can be awarded to the laity by the Papacy for distinguished service to the Roman Catholic Church.

Mike Hulme (born 1960): Mike Hulme is a professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and is the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change. He has said of his Christian faith, "I believe because I have not discovered a better explanation of beauty, truth and love than that they emerge in a world created - willed into being - by a God who personifies beauty, truth and love."

Michael Reiss (born 1960): Michael Reiss is a British bioethicist, science educator, and an Anglican priest. He was Director of Education at the Royal Society from 2006 to 2008. Reiss has campaigned for the teaching of evolution,[355] and is Professor of Science Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, where he is Pro-Director of Research and Development.

Justin L. Barrett (born 1971): Director of the Thrive Centre for Human Development and Professor of Psychology at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology after being a researcher at Oxford, Barrett is a cognitive scientist specializing in the cognitive science of religion. He has published "Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology" (Templeton Press, 2011). Barrett has been described by the New York Times as 'an observant Christian who believes in “an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God who brought the universe into being,” as he wrote in an e-mail message. “I believe that the purpose for people is to love God and love each other.”'

Denis Alexander (born 1945): Director of the Faraday Institute and author of Rebuilding the Matrix – Science and Faith in the 21st Century. He also supervises a research group in cancer and immunology at the Babraham Institute.

SECTION THREE

Four Essays

An extract from John Polkinghorne and then three blogs by Ian Robinson, Chaplain, University of Western Australia, editor of this collection (pictured below in the desert).

What really happened with Galileo and Darwin?

Extract from John Polkinghorne's masterly book Science & Theology. John Polkinghorne debunks some of the popular myths about Galileo and Darwin.

Galileo

Born in 1564, Galileo Galilei is unquestionably one of great figures in the history of science. He repudiated mere appeal to the authority Aristotle and in its place pioneered the investigative technique of combining mathematical argument with an appeal to observation and experiment. His orderly and use of the newly discovered telescope as a means the searching the heavens (resulting in the discovery of mountains on the moon, spots on the sun, satellites encircling Jupiter, and the phases of Venus) reinforced his belief in the Copernican system. By 1616 this had got him into trouble with the Vatican authorities, who believe that the Ptolemaic system, with its fixed Earth, was endorsed by the Bible. Some kind of accommodation was worked out between Galileo and his chief critic, Cardinal Belarmine. The exact terms of this agreement later became a matter of dispute and there is continuing scholarly debate on the question. The point at issue is whether Galileo was simply told not to espouse or defend the Copernican principle or whether he was also forbidden to teach it in any way whatsoever. Whatever the rights of the matter, intellectual freedom was clearly curtailed by the exercise of ecclesiastical authority.

In the 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Cast in the apparent form of an even-handed discussion of the pros and cons of the ideas of Ptolemy and Copernicus, its actual presentation of the case for Copernicanism was so overwhelming that it was clearly a tract in that system`s defence. Moreover, Simplicio, the defender of Ptolemy, was not only weak in argument and something of a buffoon, but he also stated, almost word for word, points of view which had been propounded by the current Pope, Urban VIII. It is scarcely surprising that the authorities were upset and they responded by summoning Galileo to appear before them. He was sentenced by the Inquisition to life imprisonment, immediately commuted by the Pope to continuing house arrest. At no stage was Galileo subjected to torture.

No one can claim that this is at an edifying story or that the church authorities displayed wisdom or intellectual integrity in their implacable opposition to Galileo's Copernican ideas. (The Roman Catholic ban on Copernicanism was rescinded in 1820, but Galileo's condemnation was only recently abrogated formally.) Yet the issues were complex and the illumination afforded by hindsight should not result in our painting the scene in stark black and white. There were scientific difficulties in the case presented by Galileo. One was the absence of the stellar parallax -- the shift in the current position of the stars expected to result from than being viewed from different perspectives defeat of

81 whether moving around and orbit in the course of the year. (We now know that this was not observable with 17th century resources because the stars are so very distant from us.) Galileo placed great emphasis on the claimed confirmatory value of his explanation of the tides. We now know that he was completely in error about this matter. He even ridiculed Kepler when the latter suggested that the moon might have some relevance for tidal phenomena!

Throughout the controversy, and until his death, Galileo remained a religious man. Many of his discussions with his opponents had focused on the right way in which to read the Bible. Galileo genuine evaluate its spiritual authority, but the fact that it is written in language intended to be understood by common people meant, in his opinion, that it was illegitimate to try to read advanced physical theory out of its pages. If there was an apparent conflict between the surface meaning of words of Scripture and the results of science, Galileo believed that the should encourage us to seek a deeper understanding of the relevant biblical passage -- a view for which he could appeal to the support of St. Augustine, no less.

Cardinal Bellarmine had urged upon Galileo the view that mathematical theories like that of Copernicus, were just means of ' saving the appearances', that is to say that they were calculation devices and not necessarily to be taken seriously as literal descriptions. Here we have an engagement with one of the fundamental questions in the philosophy of science, to which we will subsequently return. Are scientific theories just convenient manners of speaking, or do they describe the physical world as it actually is?

Finally, there were the personal aspects of the controversy: Urban VII's wounded pride, Galileo's brilliant but polemically shrill use of the Italian language, and the ambitions of Galileo's opponents amongst the Jesuit astronomers (to this day effective participants in the scientific community). These varied considerations do not mean that the Roman Catholic authorities did not make a bad mistake. Of course they did, but in complex and cloudy circumstances. The Galileo affair by no means indicates that there is an inevitable incompatibility between science and religion. One unwise incident does not imply a continuing conflict.

Darwin

And do we not see the same thing happening all over again following the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's origin of species? Once more popular myth presents a picture of light confronting darkness. The image of Galileo before the Inquisition is succeeded by the image of Thomas Huxley vanquishing Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the debate at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. The story goes that the Bishop was unwise enough to ask Huxley whether he descended from an ape via his grandfather or his

82 grandmother. Such a tasteless tactic brought the stern rebuke that Huxley would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a Bishop who was unwilling to face the truth.

There is, in fact, some doubt about what actually happened on this occasion. Huxley’s own version was put on paper thirty years after the event and the contemporary accounts are by no means unanimous in recounting a famous victory by the scientist. Be that as it may, once again the full story is more complex and confused than the myth allows.

At the scientific level, there were contemporary biological critics of the idea of evolution by natural selection, like Sir Richard Owen, the greatest anatomist of the day, who pointed to difficulties in Darwin’s thesis. Indeed Wilberforce himself, who was genuinely interested in scientific matters, wrote a review of the Origin which Darwin acknowledged as making some telling points in relation to the problems faced by the theory. The great British physicists of the nineteenth century, such as Faraday, Maxwell and Stokes, were silent in public but privately had doubts about the unaided adequacy of natural selection to explain the development of life on the timescale available. Lord Kelvin broke the silence when he claimed that the rate of the Earth's cooling and the length of the era during which the Sun could have been shining restricted the time available to a period much shorter than that required by Darwin’s theory. While Kelvin’s calculations were correct in terms of the known physics of his day, he was unaware of the processes of radioactivity (which has a significant warming effect upon the Earth) and nuclear fusion (which has powered the Sun for the five billion years of its shining).

If the scientific scene was confused, so was the religious. At the very same meeting of the British Association which had seen the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce, Frederick Temple, later to be Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a sermon welcoming the insights of evolution. There was by no means uniform opposition to Darwin’s ideas from within the Church. Charles Kingsley took a robust view of accepting scientific truth and insight, seeing natural selection as relating to the ‘how; of God’s creative actions and interpreting evolution as replacing the notion of God’s instant act by the subtler and more satisfying idea of a creation brought into being and able then to ‘make itself’. One of Darwin’s friends and regular correspondents, Asa Gray the Harvard botanist, did much to make evolution a respectable idea among thinking people in North America, while remaining a deeply religious man.

Once again, there were personal factors at work, influencing the behaviour of the participants. Wilberforce may have wanted to stand on his episcopal dignity, but Thomas Huxley was also strongly motivated by non-intellectual considerations, such as the desire to reduce the traditional influence of the clergy and to establish the authority of the newly emerging class of professional scientists.

Charles Darwin’s own loss of the Christian belief he had held as a young man is thought to have been at least as much influenced by the harrowing death of his daughter Annie at the age of ten, as by his

83 scientific discoveries. In assessing Darwin’s later cautious utterances on religion one must remember his sensitive wish not to offend his wife Emma, who was a person of religious faith, but he never became an out-and-out atheist. Even Huxley did not go so far as explicit atheism, coining the word ‘agnostic’ to describe those who, like himself, felt the question of God’s existence to be beyond settlement.

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ's words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: 'They know not what they do'.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

'Love in Action', Strength To Love (1963, 1981), 43.

Keeping Me Awake

I just walked past the same biology lab where once the lights went on for me. I was a young Christian and science undergraduate. I was being hammered by the atheistic science-lecturers (yes, they were proselytizing for atheism). On the balcony before the lab opened I was reading the theologian Francis Schaeffer. A superb critical thinker, he was able to describe the integrity of Christian thought within the western tradition. Faith and science were able to interleave very well for me.

Just lately, the very opposite is being shouted from the rooftops. Students entering this university have almost all sucked up the vibe from secondary school that science and faith are immiscible liquids. My reading, viewing, public debates, many articles and some corridor conversations on campus have started to keep me awake at night. I want to reach beyond the carp and appeal to the best instincts of church people and science people. I am irritated by the low quality of the debates, but even more, I fear for science if it clears Christianity from its corridors. I fear for the church if it becomes anti-intellectual and anti-science. Here is why.

The Methods of Some Current Atheist Scientists

Reason without reasons

Atheist scientists often claim to be speaking on behalf of “reason” and “humanity” against “belief” and “the church”. In historical perspective, they are simply speaking Humean philosophy (that’s David Hume the Scottish sceptic) in the frame of mid twentieth century Positivism. That is, without realising it, they speak from an identifiable philosophical frame with its own beliefs. For example, one of these oft-stated beliefs is ‘everything can be known by the scientific method’. Can it? Try finding a thought, love, truth, space, value, morality, beauty, etc... in fact anything that makes life worthwhile really. I respect their choice to hold such a belief but the fact is – a ‘belief’ is all it is.

Last night on the popular science TV show Catalyst, they spoke of multiverses existing in an infinite time loop, and were able to hold an exciting belief in the intelligence behind the universe, possibly time-travelled backwards from future humans, though not of course a personal being, not God! And they have the cheek to say that theists have no evidence! They glory in ‘scientific method’ but they show by this that they themselves do not know what it is. Their take on Rationalism is not an

85 absolute but they act as though it deserves to be. Given that they have heard alternatives from intelligent scientists who hold to faith, the hubris in this is breath-taking.

Probability is not possibility

One particular problem with Humean scepticism is that their definition of Reason deals only with probabilities, the most reasonable probable explanation is the true one. Like a microscope in a macro world, probability can therefore only focus on repeated events, can only look at normality. It means therefore that no singularity or unique event or object is able to be processed. So a singular God or an anomalous event like a miracle simply cannot fit the starting criteria, and so it appears through the Humean microscope like a great blur. In science, say with a supernova, they move to indirect lines of evidence and inductive reasoning, but try to do that in regards to God and they use their microscope to say that the evidence is too indistinct. It does not ‘prove’ that God cannot exist or miracle don’t happen but simply that they have used the wrong intellectual instrument for the task. The many repeated events that show forth an act of God, according to a faith tradition, repeated and shared experiences are each discounted as a single experience. Science is a mechanics workshop in a street where people know they need also to find what they need in the artist’s studio, the bakery, the kindergarten and the church. The answer to a question for the mechanic can never be “cobalt blue” – he simply wants the right spanner. Next door, the cobalt blue they are using sends peace through everyone who sees it. Meanwhile next door in the bakery, chemistry is being practised by a dob of butter stirred in with love not by spectrometric analysis and algebraic formulae. Christianity addresses the people in their depth and variety, the whole street. Humans are not Humean.

Myopic scorn

So I am troubled by the lack of self-awareness of their own methods and annoyed at the dismissal of critical lines of evidence that it precipitates. My third worry is the way that tertiary level arguments are levelled against high school perceptions of Christianity. To spin the blame around, it is like intellectual Christians comparing their best message with science as seen in homeopathy or alien abduction or “Popular Science” magazine. I wince when I hear science being described by young- earth creationists as though they own both the theories of science and the doctrine of Creation. Further, I actually struggle to recognise my faith in the cavalier protests of the atheists, though I too have heard the rumours that there are Christians somewhere who say such things as they quote. They routinely show that they know next to nothing about philosophy, church history, or theology, every bit as bad as the Creationists’ ignorance of science. Yet with more impatience than I want to admit, I sit there while they speak with arm-waving authority and school-room humour that they have proved something. Simply, please be fair, or ask yourself instead why you prefer to use scorn. What would happen to science if you employed such myopic dismissals?

Science deserves some mistrust

My fourth criticism is less philosophical. There are reasons why large parts of the population have turned away from science in recent generations. We have watched the lab-coat authority of eugenics otherwise known as genetic modification, the accidental holocaust of DDT, unmitigated pollution, run-away climate change, the use and threat of nuclear weapons and invasion of privacy through technologies. Some science has created fear and destruction. Some science has overturned

86 nature in all its fragility, beauty, balance and restorative power. No scientist meant to do that, but they did. Such destruction is not new to science when stripped from theology. In an earlier generation we saw (not biological evolution, a brilliant conception) the theory of social evolution, wherein one race assumed its superiority over another race, used as an absolute reason to subjugate them or wipe them out – ‘the stronger shall supplant the weaker’, as one white man explorer said, and he even called it a ‘divine fiat’. As a theology it is simply appalling, but it was written as science – the evolution-law of ‘advantage enhancing survival’. See how a scientific description of survivalism became a prescription and prerogative to dominate. As a result we witnessed historically the destruction of peoples, environments, cultures, languages and families, and we now see a legacy which Aboriginal persons still live with daily. Most scientists did not want that to happen, but it did.

The scientific method or the institution of science is no great white angel and lost the trust that all other institutions have lost in the recent generation. No wonder that parts of society revert to creation-science in theology, dubious alternative therapies in medicine, horoscopes in our magazines, New Age in pursuit of social wellbeing, the rejection of immunisation by parents, and so on. You may say that science did its proper thing and went on to correct those erroneous beliefs. Maybe, but it would not have gone there in the first place if science had a way to hold more closely to the humanist values that it now wants to claim. The Humeans burned that bond. The legacy of the scientific method is therefore every bit as flawed as any other historic institution, including the church. A more intellectually-anchored humility such as I have hint at here might reassure the populace that more accidental destruction was not being let loose from behind laboratory doors. Unfettered science is just another fundamentalism.

How will science anchor its humility and secure its gifts? Science needs Christianity. I will come back to the way that Christianity needs science as a bulwark against the anti-intellectual fringe but go with me for now.

Science Needs Christianity

Love of the truth

All science values the pursuit of truth just as Christians do. We both reject superstition, syncretism, and anecdotal explanations. But there are three reasons why science should support and not ridicule faith stances – in the fields of ethics, epistemology and wholism.

Where are your ethics from?

Firstly, everyone has ethics. All persons have a conscience except psychopaths and news editors. The church is not the sole possessor or arbiter of morality, never was, and I apologise for those bishops who try to claim that privilege. However, Christians struggle to see in the lab where scientists get their ethics from. There are new philosophical arguments about this and in a recent trend agnostics have started ‘somethings without borders’ or other NGO’s as though it is a new idea. They deserve every kind of support. But, pardon me, the churches have been doing that sort of thing quite selflessly for two thousand years. – clinics, hospitals, schools, community empowerment, cross cultural communication, and a long list more. Surprisingly long actually, so I wonder if it is

87 embarrassment that has motivated the atheists to get up and be counted at long last. Welcome to the dark side of reality, that is, the coal face. All help appreciated, but please don’t leave early and don’t just do it to get a line on your CV.

How strong are your ethics?

That plea leads me to my main problem. The main problem is that science does not believe their own ethics strongly enough. For example, recently in scientific journals more and more articles are being retracted. Discussion has focussed on a culture of unethical pursuit of research grants. Other examples I have given above. The boldness of science – ‘Follow the evidence wherever it leads’ – has veered towards ‘follow the grant money wherever it leads’. I actually believe that it has always been the compass – the driver for aligning with Humean rationalism rather than other positions that were available at the time, is that it was more God-free and value-free, and allowed imperial colonialism to do its worst without serious question. We are still on that course.

I bring another light to this point. Christians hold similar ethical frameworks as everyone else, as research shows, but they hold it more strongly, generously and with high emphasis on equality, community and restorative justice. That track record is there to see around the globe. Not perfect, not even close to being heaven on earth, so not immune from corruption and hypocrisy. We are also so open to the community that sometimes our God-given compassion is predated upon by manipulative persons. Ask at any neighbourhood church. At another level, ask at some trials of priests and others. I think one of the best arguments for the existence of God may be the continued existence of the church, despite its own internally-directed incompetence. But the church, like science, can reform, renew, heal ourselves and get back out there where angels fear to tread. (I am pleased to say there are stellar examples of atheists who also get out there but my point is still valid.)

Christian faith generally makes persons to be generous, hospitable and committed – beyond reasonable cost and beyond death – to make a difference with their life. The current global challenges require no less. Do you want that source to be stopped?

God does not pull strings

Secondly, science needs faith for their thinking, that is, epistemology. Theism provided historically a view of the world as stable and knowable. God had established the world to run by itself and sustained it by his power. In Theism, God was not pulling the strings. Theism is therefore the bedrock upon which science could be built. If the world was seen as capricious and unstable to the whims of the gods, no thinker would bother investigating. Not only Christianity but also Taoism and Islam provided this stable basis for the growth of science. Without theism or something very like it, there would have been no scientific endeavour.

Hooked up to the fashions of science?

What about the famous periods of history where the well-established church opposed scientific advance – the Galileo effect? A couple of points should lay that one to rest, First, the academic establishment at the time also opposed Galileo’s new ideas. They were defending, against Galileo’s ‘determination’ (ahem!), Aristotle’s cosmology not the biblical ones. Christians today who hook up their theology to their culture, to the Big Bang, to a God-of-the-gaps, are making the same error. Just

88 as lots of ‘advances’ need to be resisted on humanist or biblical grounds, so too we must resist some cheap alternatives and some third-rate but earnest theologies.

Science hooked up to theistic ethics

Let me take another step. To pursue scientific knowledge like this is ‘to think God s thoughts after him’. Such science is full of genius, gratitude and humility. It is generous in a plentiful universe, creative about the Creator and humble about our achievements. It is wondrous, endlessly curious, and often feels at awe at what we are discovering, privileged with the knowledge with which we are entrusted. People of faith are not the only ones who can feel these things, but we feel them strongly and that experience is widespread. So I wouldn’t go about destroying such a seed bed of excellence. To destroy these is to risk being led by an even greater hubris, power-plays and some other forms of tribalism.

Generous with the gift of technology

And another point was made recently at this University by Vishal Mangalwadi (p99), an Indian Christian and social activist. While great inventions and great science have arisen in other cultures and empires, it is in the Christian West that the technology has spread most widely. The benefits of scientific inventions are spread not by science but by those with a wide view of human dignity and community.

‘In most cultures, the ruling elite patronize technology if it made them stronger than their enemies, internal or external. They welcomed technology for war, pleasure, prestigious monuments and the oppression of their people. Only one culture has promoted technology for general welfare and for liberating and empowering the weak – slaves, women, children, the handicapped and the poor…the humanizing technology that came out of biblical theology.’

He gives many examples and his theory reflects many similar recent works.

More senses more data better outcome

As well as ethics (sense of morality) and epistemology (coherence, congruence), Christianity contributes a wide range of intuitive senses to build wholistic outcomes. Sense of justice, sense of connection, sense of community, sense of beauty and the ring of truth. Because of Jesus’ achievements, we interpret in the machinations of the world that Love matters more than power, Truth is something that is embodied not just thought, and ‘critique’ must result in communitarian action. Since Christianity first emerged from persecution, it has adopted a policy of shared thinking across global cultures and languages, which resulted in a creative knowledge of humanity, counter- intuitive intellectual thought, and occasionally some inter-cultural battles. Chaplains like me work against the silo-mentality of different schools of thought, attempting to find bridges in experience, reason, and history. Christians also work across the silos of the political schools in order to build alliances that will actually pursue justice for all and therefore peace through truth healing and reconciliation. Jesus spoke of ‘life in all its fullness’ and ‘the truth shall you free’ and those two things are definitely our collective experience. A wholistic vision can lead to a thoroughly wholesome life.

If a person is gifted in intellectual analysis to work in one of those myriad, small, like-minded scientific teams which focus like a laser onto specific outcomes for the health of the planet, I rejoice. Perhaps they are not well placed or well suited to look across the courtyard and see what happens to their inventions in a tawdry world. So please don’t tell me that science is all we need for a good life. We all need builders and restorers of wholeness and, I hope this is not just my bias; this is Christianity’s special task. I do hope there are other allies. To put it a little simplistically but to make my point, if the lab finds a cure for malaria, who do you think will take it to the jungles of Africa and stay there long enough at risk to themselves to see through the implementation of the solution? Science needs Christianity.

Christianity Needs Science

My last point leads straight on to assert the reverse, Christianity needs science. To bring relief to malaria sufferers we obviously need people who will fund research and build labs, do the research well and manufacture the solution at a reasonable cost. Usually these are not church activities. Church is more likely to be running the clinic that delivers the jab, running the parenting course that empowers the women and men, the playgroup that promotes support systems, and so on.

Against Superstition

Further, a world bent on superstition does dreadful things to human dignity. A world where reason does not matter produces sloppy syncretistic nonsense in the lower registers of common denominators. Let’s all think well, critique well, educate one another to think below surface impressions. Christians have been conspicuous in the education role in both east and west since the idea of education emerged. Judging from the many casualties of some church schools that I have counselled, churches and church agencies have sometimes perverted their own values by an abuse of positional power. So, let me close with how Christianity needs science – for its theology, its structures and its ethics.

Against sloppy thinking

Like science, Theology needs to be able to defend its methods, define its critique and be able to state where it is reading into the data and not reading out from it. We learn thus from the scientific method but are not restricted to it. Data in theology is not simply ‘matter’, as I said above, but it is data nonetheless and subject to the same powers of reason as science. Analysis and critique are not enough because faith means finding a basis of trust in action, usually a creative and constructive exercise. Nevertheless, like building the wall of a house that eventually needs other pictures and patterns to become a home, Theology needs the simple straight edge of scientific method to measure part of their task. In Europe they even call it ‘scientific theology’. Without it, theological thinkers have been captured in the web of the ambiguities and abstractions of language.

Address cultural assumptions

Like science, church life needs to be sure that we are addressing our own cultural assumptions. While science looks globally for its journal referees, and academic theology does the same, local

90 church leaders do not do it enough, despite Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’ that the church addresses all cultural groups.

My participation in a lifelong conversation with science, illustrated by this article, has helped to highlight the captivity of the church to western rationalist assumptions. Such captivity has restricted the church from their proper roles to follow Jesus into living up the kingdom of God – in other words, to be a global community in the service of wonder, wholeness and worship which Jesus defined and achieved.

Keep the big picture

Finally, the church’s ethics need to be challenged by science’s big picture thinking. In the current environment the trend is for faith to be privatised. Therefore, in public life it allows other monsters to dominate and predate. On the flip side the retreat into privatisation fosters judgementalism.

For instance, free enterprise economics can (unexamined) be allowed to run and ruin the world to the advantage of very few but meanwhile some parts of the church treat private sexual behaviours with vehemence. Jesus targeted that sort of hypocrisy for special attention. Mind you, if we swing to neoliberalism we are not going to change anything soon, either. The church needs to escape the traps, in a New Testament typology, of Pharisaism (privately good and endlessly nit picking) and Sadduceeism (publically powerful and bent on accommodation). The public practise of Grace, understood christianly, is a barrier to both those tendencies. It is Science’s call to remind the church that what they believe must matter more widely than their own bubble, must be transferable to someone else who tries it. Jesus would agree.

Conclusion

If you have a headache by now you know why I have lain awake at night. You might also see what I have seen and what at present I only glimpse – a future in a better partnership, and one that is not tame. Where scientists who believe in Jesus walk with those who don’t, and produce great inventions in the service of humanity which deliver even greater real world outcomes. And Christians will not claim privileges for being the only ones who know anything, and start listening, questioning their assumptions and become the global community that they were always called by Jesus to be. Let’s stay awake to that.

Zoning In On Scientific Evidence

Being the second of four claimed ‘zones’ of evidence.

Dear Ian,

Blast and darn, and great snakes! I feel like a character in a Tintin movie. I head off on an expedition to look for evidence, only to find that it is subject to interpretation of events. What about getting some solid proof from the facts? Maybe the scientists have got it right and there is no actual evidence for God at all? Hope this isn’t upsetting you.

Max Doubt

Hi Max,

Not upset, honest. Questions all welcome. I have below zoned in on the kind of evidence that you are talking about. I can’t say it is going to give you your small frame and your ‘proof from facts’. Such certainty only exists within a frame of assumptions – step outside and it is all floating again. You did say you were doing a Tintin sea- voyage?

Evidence from the Physical Universe for a Cosmic Creator

What is the evidence for God from the physical universe?

I have run this section past four local research scientists but my mistakes are all my work.

As a biochemistry undergraduate, I was in a lecture on an intricate mechanism within the human cell. With each step unveiling I was awestruck at the nano-technology of God’s Creation, AND awestruck that humans could devise ways to understand such sub-cellular pathways. I was worshipping God in the back row. But the lecturer took the opportunity to say at the very end:”Sorry to any Christians here. I have just explained away your faith.” (Not sorry really). I was shocked. How could two responses be so different to the same facts? (And what university would allow a lecturer to proselytise for atheism like this?)

To my mind, within this zone only and not to mention maybe twenty other lines of enquiry, the Cosmos presents us with four kinds of evidence: Cause, Precision, Wonder, Dimension.

Firstly, where did we come from?

We know that things that are have had a cause. Why is there something instead of nothing? There is much more chance of nothing happening than something. What was the ‘nothing’ that caused the Big Bang? Was there a place or a time when there is no cause?

What happens to science if we say that there are no causes sometimes? Or is it all a fluke, a mammoth shake of the dice of chance? You have heard this said: “If there are a billion billion planets and a billion possible universes then we had to come into existence sometime”. Notice that no actual calculations are being done here. It is like the story that says a billion monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will produce Encyclopaedia Britannica. Let us not play with infinity again. I just don’t believe that there is a Britannica on a planet out there in the universe somewhere that has been thus generated. What we do know is that we are the billion monkeys that generated it, and it was not random, it was conscious and intelligent. This argument says more for a personal creator than the opposite. Playing random games with infinite numbers is not mathematical; it is a game of sleight of hand.

There is a time-free First Cause, that Christians call an eternal non-physical God.

Second, why does it all work?

How it works is interesting enough to some. They tell us there are only four forces that hold everything, yes all the galaxies and all their matter and energy, in balance.

Gravity the weakest force works with mass over very long range, holds all the universes in motion, makes apples fall, and causes all my motorcycle accidents.

The strong and weak atomic forces are both short range, holding neutrons and protons in place in the nucleus despite magnetic repulsion (strong force), and lots of particles and particle change are made through the weak force. The fourth is electromagnetic force, which is light, magnetism and interaction between charged particles. That’s big and small, long range and small range, both in wave form and particle form.

The genius of the equation E=mc2 is that it points to all of these forces. We know it works because we can blow things up with it. It indicates the radical leap of imagination that mass and energy are interchangeable. The logical boundaries between material and non-material are porous. What is more, these four forces are held in place by only ten universal constants.

If any one of them were slightly stronger or slightly weaker than their constant value, the universe would have done something entirely different and we would not be here. Something else would be, but the point I am making would still be valid.

These forces and constants underline all the Laws of Physics and Quantum mechanics. Out of these laws comes the chemistry that builds your DNA, responds to random mutations, structures biochemistry and medicine and so on. So simple, the wonder of it all is that these Laws were in place within nano-seconds of the beginning of Big Bang. They did not evolve.

The complexity of this is also interesting. It is still hard to imagine how some complex proteins could have had any advantage when only quarter or half-way to complete, since even minor mutations to them cause major problems, like sickle cell anaemia. It is hard to imagine how biological life could have begun from chemicals alone and, as if one living cell wasn’t hard enough, the process then became predominantly sexual reproduction, and had to find two organisms the same. Too hard – unguided, the chemistry alone would take too long.

But people used to say this about the human eye – ‘too complex, no advantage in half an eye, etc.’ – but a scientific survey by Dawkins has settled the logic on that one. However, he was not convincing on the time that random mutations only would have needed. Maybe science will answer this, maybe not. For that reason, biological and biochemical complexity by itself is not an argument, in my view, though it is wondrous. I want to focus behind the complexity to the great simplicity of the Laws, the Symmetries.

I am trying to make two points. My softer point is this: we believe that these constants are set by design to bring us into being. It is called ‘the anthropic principle’, and some scholars say that the ‘fine tuning’ for humanity is so great that ‘the universe knew we were coming’.

Here is the harder point. In fact, the Laws and constants are not just there, the universe falls back to them after an instability occurs (this property is called ‘Symmetry’). The Laws did not evolve – they are the foundations and the sustaining forces for all physical reality. Doesn’t that make you wonder? An ordered instant dynamic predictable universe? Paul Davies and other scientists have concluded that the evidence warrants a great Mind. Christians call him the Word, the Creator.

NOTE: Christians can no longer employ the Argument from Design as we naively did, that is: ‘Look at the design of that fish. It is perfectly suited for the water, so it must have been directly designed by God.’ Science says that its shape evolved to suit the conditions it was evolving in. But that still does not remove the Designer. It just moves the argument to the next logical shelf. The ‘process of evolution’ is now the design, and not the designer. The Laws and constants are its tools. The time involved may be his workbench.

The third layer of physical evidence for God is: why do we wonder about these things?

My dog doesn’t. Clara just wants to be patted, play soccer, patted again, fed and (did I say patted?) and walked. And again tomorrow. BUT even if she did, I, human, wonder – why is it so. I wonder where it is going and whence has it come, and so on. My point in this zone (I will return to the consciousness aspect later) is that it appears that this planet is ideally positioned for such a human creature. If our solar system were situated in the centre of our galaxy’s spinning arm in the Milky Way, we would have no darkness. There would be so many stars, 2000 times as bright as the moon, in our near vicinity that the night sky would be bright objects set in milk. But we are a planet drifting out into open galactic space, able to see past the immediate stars towards the very ends of the universe. And so we gaze, we earthling humans, positioned to wonder why we are here and where did we come from.

Christians say we were made for this, in fact the whole Universe sings his praise.

Fourthly, where is God – a matter of perspective?

God is not only non-material and non-time, outside our usual four dimensions in other words, he walks in some other dimension (s) from which we are materially excluded. This is recalled in the story of the young couple who were excluded from walking in God’s garden (Genesis). It may be a fifth dimension or even a sixth or an eleventh. The way between dimensions is to some degree porous. It requires a different way of looking at our material existence. Am I speaking theologically or scientifically now? Both! I am certainly not the first to make this observation (there is hardly an original thought in this entire talk).

That new perspective is pressed upon us by the science of the subatomic particles, quantum mechanics. This perspective is so important, for instance, international consortia have spent billions of Euros on a subterranean atomic collider in Europe in order to investigate this very perspective and properties. For another instance, the fact that we cannot see Gravity but can measure it by other means is analogous to the way that we cannot see God but can know Him by other means. If you want to find God, use the right instruments, obviously not the four-dimensional ones.

So that’s what we believe – what’s your explanation for Something in existence, for the constancy of laws, and why do we wonder why? We say a personal non-material Creator.

NOTE: I am not trying to find a God who fills in the Gaps of our knowledge. We don’t want to hook up our whole understanding of faith to the ‘truths of science’ as it stands at the moment – terrible things have been done through that heresy. The grounds of science change all the time. If they find a Little Whimper that preceded the Big Bang, so what for our Faith?

NOTE also that I am not arguing for the kind of extreme truth that condemns all others to hell. I am asserting a permanently open enquiry into what we know which also leaves room for what we do

95 not yet know and what we can never know. The Bible repeatedly says: ‘the mystery is revealed, so obey what you do know.’

An Experiment in Extraordinary Wonder

Hi Ian,

I have been thinking that I am asking for trouble on my expedition to find evidence. That is, what is a reasonable form of enquiry to find God? For instance, it is easy to dismiss a Santa Claus type of figure. I dismiss as morally repugnant a war-mongering god. I would say also that the theory of Intelligent Design is a religious statement and not a scientific one, because science is about finding causes, not covering them. How do I do this with an open mind? So, how would I conduct an experiment that is appropriate to find the Christian God?

Cheers,

Max Doubt

Hi Max,

You’re a genius, mate. Great question. First, to get oriented to the nature of the object of enquiry, some data from the Bible. That’s because we are often talking about different things when we say “God”. For this experiment, let’s start with a super-short literature search in the Bible to establish the kind of thing we are going to talk about and look for. You may need to pull out a Bible or an on- line reading bible.

Romans 1. 18-20 – talks about the presence of God in the world, only obscured by people not wanting to know. Is that so? What evidence would substantiate that claim?

John 1.1-18 – says that the Word of God, an intelligent principle called Logos by the ancient Greeks, is present and at work both in the beginning and operation of Creation and in the person of Jesus and the circumstances of his life. That means the Presence is personal not passive.

Psalm 139.1-18 – makes all this even more personal, to you and me. It says God can be known on our inside, knowing us thoroughly, so that everywhere and everyone is a sacred space. Worship and wonder can take place fully not just in dedicated sacred spaces.

So now, experimental method. What is the right tool for the job?

1. Why would a microscope NOT work? Even a really powerful one like an electron microscope?

Well obviously, God is non-material. It is an obvious but surprisingly overlooked starting point for the enquiry. God is spirit. What’s that? A Code for being not there at all? We need to find ways to break this down into smaller steps, so that the fifth dimension, as it were, can be recognised intelligently. It is unreasonable to insist that the only valid evidence must be material evidence from four dimensions. There is plenty of consequential evidence in those dimensions but that is not what they are insisting upon. To do so is simply not to do the experiment for something whose dimensions are non-material. So the fact that such a one would end up saying ‘not there, no evidence’ was a fact nested in their assumption and their method, and is not a conclusion from the evidence. It is not ‘evidence-based’ anything. So let’s get closer in on the question.

2. Is God more like a brick or more like light?

God is more like energy and not like the empirical sort of matter. However, God is still an entity. We know this form of existence is fairly normal, like a photon of light which can act as a packet of energy and which can also act as a wavelength of energy. In this case God of a non-electro-magnetic kind. Since 22% of the universe is dark energy, we know such a dimensionality is possible.

3. Is this investigation more like chemistry or like gravity?

God is beyond the immediate reach of material science, point made by now. So unlike chemistry in one sense, but like it in another. Reactions are theoretically predictable, but laboratory work does not quite go as simply as that. Lab technique is all important, and so it is with God – ‘what do you think you are doing?’ is a good question to ask of this experiment in extraordinary wonder. On the other hand, God inhabits a field of being with operations that can be sensed – so, a bit like gravity, a form of energy which can be traced by instruments, but whose energy waves have proved elusive so far. Again, God is like dark matter which is gravitational but not the same as the mass we know. Note that I am NOT saying that God is the explanation for all the things we do not yet know scientifically, like dark matter and dark energy. Some people do that, but they are mistaken in my view, and do not need to. I am saying that the logic of this kind is every bit as experimental as our major scientific categories.

Let’s move on to a question of dynamics.

4. This is getting harder. If God as we say is a complex personal being, are our experiments more like the dissection of a dog, or more like treating a dog that is alive in the veterinary waiting room? The latter.

Imagine a doctor heading towards you as a patient with a scalpel in hand and a gleam in her eye yet clearly showing to you that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. Are you going to just sit there? God recognises poor experimental technique and, as it were, crawls off the bench. Things like ‘what do you think you are doing’ and ‘who do you think I am?’ This experiment involves an appropriate and complex personal interaction, like a doctor or psychiatrist, even like a veterinarian, and is not a passive dissection by somewhat prejudiced techniques.

Imagine now a biologist who brings a class to a lovely looking swamp and says ‘we can never know all about its ecology so let’s just let the mystery be! Back on the bus, everyone’. Or would they simply get started? A Christian God is like a swamp, can never be fully known, a locus of multiple systems and purposes. So get started, learn to connect with the ecology of God.

Again, I am not saying ‘God is everything we see’, in other words, pantheism. I am saying there is a complex, encompassing, dimensional presence about God, which is knowledge of a kind which scientists are quite used to dealing with.

5. Let’s try another analogy. You have fallen in love, wow never before like this. Can’t bear to be apart. You wonder whether your terrific girlfriend or dreamboat boyfriend was the right one for you to give your life to, and so, hopelessly boringly tiresomely in love, you puppy, you asked your best friend’s advice. What would you think if they said: ‘Let’s go to the lab and measure your pheromones? That will tell us.’ Actually, even saying it like this is amusing. That’s because it is so obvious that an empirical response might describe a phenomenon but won’t tell us anything useful about the personal question. You would be assured if the friend’s response was to ask whether you two communicate deeply, mutually, non-dominating, responsive, wanting the best for the other, caring and open? That is getting more like the experiment in extraordinary wonder.

God, the Christian bible tells us repeatedly, is like love, big love, purposeful, inviting, non-dominant love.

OK that’s probably enough of analogies. There have been lots of analogies through the centuries, most of them eventually got pushed too far and broke down. And there have been lots of ‘experiments’ with the wrong instruments.

The Right Instrument

Isn’t the right instrument, ultimately, the heart of you? An open minded experiment with the appropriate instruments is as follows: A sceptical person could say: ‘if you are there and you want me, God, I won’t let any material pre-conceptions or egotistical demands stand in the way? Since you are God and not me, I will remain open to the time and way of your choosing.’ Then you wait, alert to assumptions and egotism that will invalidate the experiment, until God shows up or not. It is your best Self that is the right instrument, calibrated by those who have made this journey before you.

Catch 122, as if you needed to hear one more. Ego. All spiritualities, management theories, relationship counselling and books of wisdom provide this warning on the box. We so easily reduce the hard questions to our own needs. I will look out for God if… I can get a bike, a miracle, the world the way I want it, my own fears answered or… The fat relentless ego, as one sage called it, is also subtle, capable of unconscious seduction and the unconscionable. We need to at least to attempt to stand clear of that edge.

That is a method which recognises the most basic data on the dimensions, qualities, personality and status of the object of enquiry. It uses analogous methods from similar problems in science. I can’t think of another experiment that is appropriate to the actual object we are actually testing for.

It is not a trick. It is not a covert attempt to get you converted without you meaning to. That would be impossible. It is an experiment. You can simply ask Jesus to do all this at any time in any words of your own choosing. Apart from the naive assumption that everything is only material, that objects of enquiry must be passive, this is a scientific method. Try the proper experiment, and if you won’t, then no wonder you can’t find anything out.

And if what you do instead is argumentative dissection, use the invalid instruments of say chemistry and biology; the tools of material science being misapplied to another, use crappy lab technique, then don’t call yourself a reasonable scientist. If you push aside this valid experiment, then it wasn’t Reason or science that made you do it, it wasn’t openness to enquiry that motivated your objections, and it wasn’t something someone else did to you. It was your own self-limiting methodology.

Think about it - what else in your life and science will dissolve under such a method? What other values and relationships will be crushed by this pretence of openness? What other options in science will be excluded if you are not willing to look in certain directions?

On the other hand, you could wonder. That would be no small thing. Like Love.

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Short Bibliography

Collins, Francis (2010) Belief – readings on the reason for faith, Harper Collins, NY

Mangalwadi, Vishal (2011) The Book that Made Your World – how the bible created the soul of western civilization, Thomas Nelson, Nashville ISBN 978-1-5955-5322-5

McGrath, Alister E (2010) Science and religion – a new introduction, 2nd Ed, Wiley Blackwell Oxford

Polkinghorne, John (12998) Science and Theology –an n introduction, SPCK Fortress Press, London

Schmidt, Alvin J (2001, 2004) How Christianity changed the World – if Jesus had never lived, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, and ISBN 978-0-310-26449-1

Varghese, Roy Abraham (2004), The Wonder of the World – a journey from modern science to the mind of God, Tyr Publishing ISBN 0-9723473-1-3

Websites of international level Science and Faith organisations http://www.reasonablefaith.org/ http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/ http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/ http://www.starcourse.org/jcp/qanda.html http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Institute.php http://biologos.org/ http://www.cis.org.uk/ http://www.iscast.org/

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Carl Sagan 1934-1996

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual...The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

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